The London Cleopatra’s Needle – having survived a deadly and storm-thrashed sea journey – has indeed accrued the most macabre legends. There are claims that Cleopatra’s Needle emits an occult power that encourages passers-by to fling themselves into the Thames. As well as being a favoured spot for suicides, this allegedly cursed artefact is said to contain the spirit of an Egyptian pharaoh and to have been the focus of a magical ritual by Aleister Crowley. The homeless and destitute who congregate on the Embankment will go nowhere near it, mocking laughter is said to echo over the water at night, and a character with scaly skin and a tall headdress has been seen diving into the Thames beside it without causing a ripple or splash.

Cleopatra’s Needle in London towers beside the Thames (Photo: Mrs Ellacott)

Cleopatra’s Needle in New York was the focus of rituals involving thousands of Freemasons. Hauled across the Atlantic and dragged through the city thanks to the most remarkable feats of engineering – and thanks to the interventions of America’s richest man – the needle is said to stand in a weird Masonic alignment with New York’s other obelisks. The London Cleopatra’s Needle, it’s claimed, is also positioned as part of a network of occult sites – arranged in the shape of a pentagram some reckon, as a diagram of the eye of the Egyptian god Horus insist others.

Cleopatra’s Needle in New York City’s Central Park (Photo: Ingfbruno)

Below is a story of colonial competition, of the jostling of rising and falling empires. It’s a tale of Masonic schemes to transmit age-old messages encoded in hieroglyphs; an account of eerie time capsules, World War I bombs, the spirits of dead sailors, and outpourings of dark energy said to have influenced none other than Jack the Ripper. It’s a story of how Cleopatra’s Needles crossed seas and oceans and how they continue to assert their weird and baleful power upon our minds even today.

The Early History of Cleopatra’s Needles – Sun Gods, Huge Granite Columns and Cleopatra’s Roman Lovers

Around 1450 BC, Pharaoh Thutmose III decided to commemorate his 30 years on the throne by ordering two obelisks to be sculpted from enormous, single blocks of red granite. These blocks were quarried at Aswan – close to the Nile’s first cataract – then somehow transported over 500 miles to Heliopolis, which now lies in the northern suburbs of Cairo. Though the Nile was definitely involved in moving these massive monuments, no one is quite sure how Thutmose managed to shift them over such a long distance. Thutmose had hieroglyphs inscribed in a single column on each of the four sides of Cleopatra’s Needles and the obelisks were then erected outside a temple to the sun, with each guarding one side of its gateway. (In Ancient Egypt, obelisks symbolised the rays of the sun god Aten-Ra.) Around two centuries after Thutmose had set the obelisks up, Pharaoh Ramesses II added more hieroglyphs to celebrate his military triumphs – arranging his text in two columns running down the obelisks’ sides, flanking Thutmose’s carvings.

The obelisks remained outside the temple of the sun for more than 1,400 years, although at some point they seem to have toppled over and lain buried in sand for half-a-century. In 12 BC, the Romans moved them over the-not-inconsiderable distance of 130 miles to Alexandria. (Again, the Nile was involved and – again – we don’t know exactly how they did it.) There they were erected outside the Caesareum – a temple built by Cleopatra in homage to her Roman lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. (Hence, the obelisks’ connection with Egypt’s most famous – and last – pharaoh.) The monuments stayed at the Caesareum for almost two millennia, but the obelisk that would become the London Cleopatra’s Needle once again tipped over and was covered by sand. This turned out to be fortunate as it meant its hieroglyphs were protected from the eroding effects of the desert’s sand-blasting storms. But the ambitions of new and rising empires meant the long stay of Cleopatra’s Needles outside the Caesareum would not prove permanent.

A sketch of the ruins of the Caesareum from 1798. The Cleopatra’s Needle that ended up in New York City is upright. The London obelisk can be made out in the foreground, mostly buried in sand.

Cleopatra’s Needle Is Readied for Transport to London – Battles, Egyptomania, Rival Obelisks and the Beginnings of ‘the Curse’

In 1798, Napolean launched an invasion of Egypt, an act that began decades of struggles for control of the country between the British, the French, the fading Ottoman Empire that had ruled Egypt for centuries, and Egyptian leaders who wanted to establish a powerful independent state with colonial territories of its own. These conflicts would involve battles, revolts and diplomatic manoeuvrings. Additionally, when Napolean invaded Egypt, he brought with him around 160 ‘savants’ – scholars, linguists, archaeologists and scientists – to investigate that intriguing land of temples, statues and tombs. There were also around 2000 artists and engravers, who created images of these monuments. As the research of the savants and the sketches of the artists filtered back to Europe, they sparked a phenomenon known as Egyptomania, in which the continent went mad for all things Ancient Egypt. Egyptian designs influenced furniture and jewellery, Egyptian themes cropped up in novels and plays, and pyramid-shaped mausoleums appeared in Europe’s graveyards. Egyptomania also led to an enthusiasm for real Egyptian objects, with mummies, artefacts and even obelisks ‘acquired’ from the country. It’s against this backdrop of colonial power struggles and Egyptomania that the story of Cleopatra’s Needle plays out.

In 1819, the viceroy and de facto ruler of Egypt and Sudan – an Albanian named Mohammed Ali, who’d wrested significant power from the Ottomans – bestowed (the reclining) Cleopatra’s Needle on the British as a diplomatic gift. This present was intended to celebrate British triumphs over the French at the Battle of the Nile (courtesy of Lord Nelson) and the Battle of Alexandria (under Sir Ralph Abercromby). The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, expressed gratitude for the gift, but the Brits were faced with the problem of how on earth to transport the 224-ton, 69-foot megalith the 3880 nautical miles to England. With no solutions becoming apparent, the obelisk was allowed to stay in its age-old position in the Caesareum’s ruins. As time drifted on, however, certain people in the British establishment became increasingly unhappy at the thought of such a prestigious monument lying unappreciated under its centuries of sand.

Coloured photograph of Sir James Edward Alexander in 1860. Some years later he would strive to bring Cleopatra’s Needle to London.

In 1867, General Sir James Edward Alexander – a Scottish writer, traveller, soldier and Egypt enthusiast – visited Paris, where his competitive instincts were inflamed by his observation that the French already possessed an Egyptian obelisk. In the Place de la Concorde, there towered a magnificent, yellow-granite, 75-foot monolith, boasting a weight of over 250 tons. This obelisk – from Luxor – had been gifted by Muhammed Ali in 1833, possibly as part of a strategy of using Egypt’s wealth of ancient artefacts to play Egypt-obsessed European nations off against each other. Tolerating far less delay and dithering than the British, the French had shipped their megalith home and had unveiled it in October 1836 in a ceremony officiated by King Louis Phillipe in front of 200,000 people.

The Luxor obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, Paris (Photo: Craig Booth)

Alexander was determined that London should have an obelisk to match the one reared up in Paris. Accompanied by the British Consul General Edward Stanton, Alexander met the Khedive of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha. Isma’il was a visionary leader, but – under his ambitious rule – Egypt had slid into debt. Modernisation programmes – encouraging industrialisation, urbanisation, agricultural improvement and the expansion of education – as well as costly wars with Ethiopia had bankrupted the treasury. The European powers had used these pressures to wring concessions from Isma’il Pasha, with the British and French assuming control of most of Egypt’s finances and acquiring Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal. Against such a background, it’s likely that Isma’il felt he had little choice but to go along with Alexander’s determination to get Cleopatra’s Needle out of Egypt. Incidentally, if Cleopatra’s Needle is cursed, Isma’il Pasha may have been one of its first victims. He would be swiftly removed from power – at France and Britain’s behest – in 1879. He went into exile, eventually being offered sanctuary by the Ottomans, where he ended up virtually a state prisoner in an Istanbul palace beside the Bosphorus. He died in 1895, due to – according to Time magazine – the effects of trying to down two bottles of champagne in one swig.

Isma’il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan. Was he the first victim of Cleopatra’s Needle’s curse?

Alexander now needed to work out a way to shift the colossal obelisk and to find the money to fund its voyage. Help for both these matters came through a friend, a stupendously wealthy surgeon, dermatologist and – yes – fellow Egypt nut called Sir William James Erasmus Wilson. In 1877, Wilson agreed to contribute the massive sum of £10,000 (almost one million in modern money) to finance the monolith’s journey. While trying to figure out how this journey would be accomplished, Wilson turned to a friend: a locomotive and railroad engineer and – again – Egypt obsessive named Mathew William Simpson. Simpson, who worked for the Khedive, came up with the idea of digging the obelisk out of the sand then cocooning it in an iron tube, 16 feet wide and 92 feet long. The plan was that, once constructed, this cocoon would become a cylinder-shaped boat, named the Cleopatra. The Cleopatra would be tugged by a steamship – the Olga – all the way to England.

1830s lithograph of the Caesareum. The New York Cleopatra’s Needle stands in the background while the London needle is partly buried in sand.

As Simpson – due to his obligations to the Khedive – was unable to devote himself to the work, he recruited another engineer – John Dixon – to finish off the design. John kitted out the Cleopatra with a rudder, keels, mast, bridge and cabin. He had the Cleopatra built in pieces in England, at the Thames Iron Works. These pieces were shipped out to Egypt then fitted around the obelisk under the direction of Waynam Dixon, John’s brother. Finally, the Cleopatra was ready for its journey, waiting to be hooked up to the Olga, which would be under the command of one Captain Booth. At this point – it seems – the obelisk was ready to show its fury and discomfort at being hauled away from its native land.

Ferocious Storms, Death at Sea and a Strange Time Capsule – Cleopatra’s Needle’s ‘Cursed’ Voyage to London

The strange procession of the Olga and Cleopatra – with the latter commanded by one Captain Carter and crewed by Maltese mariners – sailed through the Mediterranean with little incident. But as the ships were passing through the notoriously temperamental Bay of Biscay, an incredible storm blew up. With the rain smashing down, the wind battering the boats and the waves unrelenting and mountainous, Captain Booth became convinced the Cleopatra would sink, taking the Olga down with it. He decided to attempt a rescue of the Cleopatra’s crew before cutting the ropes and letting Cleopatra’s Needle drop to the ocean bed in its metal sarcophagus. A smaller boat, manned by six sailors, set out from the Olga to pick up the Cleopatra’s men. However, the raging sea overwhelmed the smaller boat and its sailors were lost. Eventually, the Olga managed to draw up alongside the Cleopatra and save its five crew members. Captain Booth then ordered the tow ropes cut and the Cleopatra was carried away on the waves, with all those present assuming the tubelike ship with its cursed cargo would sink. Five days later, however, a Spanish fishing craft spotted an odd-looking boat bobbing on the now-much-calmer sea. It was the Cleopatra, miraculously undamaged. Mathew Simpson’s innovative design had somehow survived all the Bay of Biscay could hurl at it. A Glasgow steamer – the Fitzmaurice – towed the Cleopatra to the northern Spanish port of Ferrol. The Anglia – a paddle tug – was then sent to haul the Cleopatra to Britain.

Cleopatra’s Needle Being Brought to England, by George Knight, 1877. The Olga and Cleopatra are depicted struggling in rough seas.

On 21st  January, 1878, the ships reached the Thames. Shoreside crowds clapped and cheered, cannons fired salutes and all the schoolchildren in the estuary town of Gravesend were given the day off. There was some debate about where Cleopatra’s Needle would go – a wooden model of the monolith had previously been put up outside the Houses of Parliament, but this location was deemed unsuitable. Eventually, the Embankment was chosen – the curious decision being made to erect an archaic monument on a symbol of modernity and progress: the elegant riverside walkway had recently been constructed to conceal an enormous sewer, the central part of an innovative underground network devised by Joseph Bazalgette. On 12th September 1878, Cleopatra’s Needle was hoisted into position. Two Victorian sphinxes – designed by English architect George John Vulliamy – were set up on each side of the obelisk, facing inwards towards it (more on this strange orientation below). The Embankment was also lined with Egyptian-style benches, boasting camels and winged sphinxes as part of their metalwork.

An illustration from the journal ‘Engineering’ showing Cleopatra’s Needle being erected on London’s Embankment

As the obelisk was lowered into place, a time capsule was entombed beneath it. The capsule’s contents could hardly have been more Victorian. It contained a gentleman’s lounge suit and 10 illustrated newspapers, including that day’s edition of The Times. The capsule also held Bradshaw’s Railway Guide (again, a thrusting achievement of Victorian progress), an assortment of women’s dresses and cosmetics, Queen Victoria’s portrait, children’s toys, Bibles, collections of coins, a razor (more on this later), and 12 photographs of what were considered exceptionally beautiful women (these pictures are said to have been chosen by Captain Carter). Other items included a baby’s bottle, some of the cables that had hauled Cleopatra’s Needle upright, a map of London, an account of the monument’s dramatic journey to England, a three-inch bronze miniature of the obelisk, a box of cigars and a selection of hairpins. As we shall see, certain elements of this ensemble have helped fuel the mythos of a haunted Egyptian megalith and its occult influence on the darker side of life in the capital.

The Creepy Mythology of Cleopatra’s Needle – Strange Beings, Eerie Laughter, Weird Alignments, Jack the Ripper and Aleister Crowley

A certain amount of paranormal lore is associated with Cleopatra’s Needle in London. Such lore has cropped up in ghost anthologies, on websites, and in literature, poetry and film. It is, indeed, sometimes difficult to separate what might be considered ‘genuine folklore’ from internet memes and the outpourings of artistic imaginations, but this section will attempt some sort of summary of the notions that have grown up around London’s ancient obelisk.

Perhaps the most famous piece of folklore linked to Cleopatra’s Needle is chronicled in the book Haunted Waters (1957) by the ghost-hunter Elliott O’Donnell. O’Donnell starts his tome by claiming: “I have often felt when in proximity to some rivers and pools as if the water possessed a strange, magnetic influence and attraction, as well as sensing the presence of a spirit, sometimes friendly and sometimes evil and inimical.” He feels this is especially true of the Thames, which “should assuredly be haunted, for no river in Great Britain has witnessed more murders and suicides.” O’Donnell recounts how, in the early 1890s, he would wander along the Embankment and chat to “the wretched down-and-outs, homeless and hopeless” who could be found “on nearly every seat.” Some of these homeless people confided that “they had felt a ghostly presence, urging them to end their miserable existence by jumping into the river.” O’Donnell goes on to say that the “spot where Cleopatra’s Needle stands was well-know to be haunted. None of the outcasts would venture near it. Two of them told me that one night they saw a tall, nude, shadowy figure, with a peak-shaped head and a body covered with what looked like scales, suddenly appear by the needle, wave a long arm at them and leap over the wall into the river. They said that they sometimes heard unearthly groans and hellish, mocking laughter in the river.”

According to the folklorist Steve Roud in his London Lore, a peculiar London myth concerns the siting of the sphinxes at the needle’s base. The two Victorian sphinxes – decorated with hieroglyphic inscriptions reading “the good god, Thuthmosis III given life” – are facing inwards towards the needle, rather than outwards as they would have been in Egypt. It is a widespread belief, Roud states, that they were “positioned inwards to protect London from its occult power”. If there’s any truth in this legend, the other folklore linked to Cleopatra’s Needle would suggest this precaution hasn’t worked.

In London, Cleopatra’s Needle is flanked by two Victorian sphinxes – were they positioned facing inwards to contain its occult power? (Photo: DaringDonna)

London legend states the monument is a popular location for suicides. Twice, apparently, policemen were approached by an agitated woman claiming someone was about to leap in the river. The officers ran towards the obelisk, only to see the very same woman plunge into the water. It’s also claimed that the apparition of the naked diving man began appearing shortly after Cleopatra’s Needle was set up and that it is in fact the spirit of one of the sailors who perished in the Bay of Biscay. Unearthly screams heard around the monument are said to issue from the lost sailors. An inscription on the needle’s pedestal commemorates the seafarers who drowned.

One of the large Victorian sphinxes positioned on either side of Cleopatra’s Needle, London. (Photo: Colin Smith)

An even more outlandish legend insists that the spirit of Rameses II is trapped inside the obelisk and that this has meant a powerful curse has been placed on London. This assertion is linked to the infamous British magician Aleister Crowley. Allegedly, one night, Crowley conducted a ritual to liberate the soul of Rameses. The ceremony involved the feeding of animal blood to a human skeleton. I’m not sure how Crowley would have got away with dragging a skeleton through the capital’s streets or how a skeleton could be fed with anything, but Crowley’s procedure is said to have failed. It’s claimed the laughter heard around the obelisk is Rameses mocking Crowley’s attempt.

Another tale attests that in 1880 a young woman, Mrs Davis, was walking along the Embankment when she felt herself pulled against her will towards Cleopatra’s Needle. As the force dragged her closer, terrifying laughter rang out, she lost all control over her legs and hurled herself into the Thames. A vagrant rescued her, but while recovering in hospital she suffered nightmares in which she was tormented by a tall red-robed woman with black almond-shaped eyes. The woman would open her mouth, exposing fang-like teeth, before the skin and flesh were torn from her face. Another incident some claim was caused by the obelisk’s curse is easier to verify. During World War I, a bomb exploded close to Cleopatra’s Needle, with its shrapnel pitting the plinth and scarring one of the sphinxes. Following the War, this damage wasn’t mended. It was felt the scars were part of the obelisk’s story and – some would say – evidence of its curse.

Hieroglyphs on Cleopatra’s Needle. Does this London obelisk imprison the spirit of a pharaoh? (Photo: Man vyi)

A curious piece of lore relates to the time capsule embedded beneath Cleopatra’s Needle. Among other objects, it contains – if you recall – pictures of attractive women and a razor. It’s been asserted that the positioning of these items under the occult monolith sent waves of evil energy into the capital that encouraged the crimes of Jack the Ripper. While such a notion might seem far-fetched, the obelisk has made it into artistic depictions of this sinister episode in London’s history. In Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, Jack the Ripper is Dr William Gull, a high-ranking Freemason and physician to the Royal Family. Gull states: “Few symbols match this stone in its potency … carved fifteen hundred years before Christ’s birth and raised at Heliopolis by Thotmes, etched with hieroglyphic prayers that Atum, Egypt’s Sun god, might increase his sovereignty.” Gull also remarks on the “Daguerrotypes of our epoch’s most lovely women … and a razor”. Gull places the needle within a pattern of sites around the capital charged with dark mystical energy. The Ripper argues that if one were to draw lines connecting such sites – which include Hawksmoor churches (some boasting their own obelisks), Daniel Defoe’s obelisk tomb in Bunhill fields, the Tower of London with its macabre history and St Paul’s (apparently, previously, a temple of Diana) – they would make up a … pentagram. The film version of From Hell (2001) has Ian Holme, as the Ripper, informing a victim in his coach about the six men who died bringing the obelisk from Egypt before murdering her. 

Indeed, a number of writers and psychogeographers have embedded the needle as a central point in London networks of occult power. In his poetry collection Lud Heat, Iain Sinclair positions the needle as part of an arrangement of burial grounds, sacred hills, suicide ponds and Hawksmoor churches. (Nicholas Hawksmoor, nicknamed ‘the Devil’s architect’, was a Freemason fond of decorating his churches with ‘pagan’ symbols such as pyramids, mausoleums and – yes – obelisks.) The lines linking these sites form several shapes, including a triangle (or, if you like, a pyramid), a pentagram and a diagrammatic representation of the eye of the Egyptian god Horus. Sinclair writes, “There is a subsystem of fire obelisks: St Luke, Old Street, and St John, Horsleydown. They form an equilateral triangle, raised over the water, with London’s true obelisk – ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’.”

Let’s now move on to consider the Cleopatra’s Needle in New York, which – as we shall see – is also not lacking in occult significance nor in theorists eager to place it within systems of dark power in that metropolis.

Egyptian-style benches on London’s Embankment – evidence of Egyptomania? (Photo: Robin Sones)

Cleopatra’s Needle Comes to New York – America’s Egyptomania, Nautical Adventurers, Cannonballs and Freemasons

In New York’s Central Park, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stands an artefact that at first looks somewhat incongruous. On a hillock – known as Greywacke Knoll – is a red granite obelisk covered in faded hieroglyphs. Weighing in at 250 tons (even its pedestal weighs a hefty 50), the obelisk is officially the oldest outdoor manmade structure in New York. This object – forming a strange backdrop to the park’s lycra-clad traffic of cyclists and joggers – reaches a height of 68 feet. It would have appeared even more striking when first set up in 1880, when few buildings in New York were that tall.

The process by which this monument came to be in this location is a story that in some ways mirrors the transportation of its twin obelisk to London. For New York – and American society in general – was experiencing its own version of Egyptomania. Some of the city’s more outlandish tombs – and even some of its prisons – had been built with Egyptian-influenced designs. The 50-foot granite walls of the Croton Reservoir – completed in 1842 – had been constructed in an Egyptian style. Around 1878, when London claimed its obelisk, New York was mushrooming in size and gaining in importance, with the Industrial Revolution and immigration firing its growth. As the prime city of an ambitious emerging empire, New York felt it needed its very own artefact from an impressive empire of yore. And, as with the London needle, this would be achieved courtesy of a determined and obsessive military officer, his influential backers, a very rich patron, some astounding feats of engineering, and a daring voyage.

An 1842 Lithograph of the Croton Reservoir – a sign of New York City’s Egyptomania?

How this version of Cleopatra’s Needle came to be in New York is outlined in an excellent 2020 episode of the Bowery Boys podcast. The podcast tells us that procuring the obelisk became the passion project of several wealthy men, but it particularly came to motivate one Colonel Henry Honychurch Gorringe. Gorringe was an intriguing character, much of whose life was bound up with both mythology and the sea. As a boy, he was shipwrecked then rescued from the coast of India. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War and by the beginning of the 1870s had got a job at the US Hydrographic Office, in which he produced maps of coastlines and drew nautical charts. Gorringe had numerous adventures at sea and at one point became convinced he’d rediscovered the mythical land of Atlantis. In the mid-1870s, he ended up in Alexandria, where he first beheld the twin set of Cleopatra’s Needles at the Caesareum. Perhaps knowing the recumbent obelisk had been promised to the British, Gorringe started to form ideas regarding its still-upright sibling. He began to agitate for the up-and-coming nation of the USA to claim its own gargantuan Egyptian artefact.

Henry Honychurch Gorringe in 1883 – did he fall victim to the curse of Cleopatra’s Needle?

He was far from the only American with such an ambition. The country’s growing self-confidence and the liberal dose of Egyptomania the young nation had ingested had led many to a conviction that they must match their European rivals and show them that New York was truly one of the globe’s foremost cities. With more than a hint of sarcasm, one newspaper commented, “It would be absurd for the people of any great city to hope to be happy without an Egyptian obelisk. Rome has had them this great while and so has Constantinople. Paris has one; London has one. If New York was without one, all those great sites might point the finger of scorn at us and intimate that we could never rise to any real moral grandeur until we had our obelisk.”

Gorringe was a Freemason, and this too would motivate him to acquire one of the Cleopatra’s Needles for New York. The Freemasons – a mysterious and influential secret society – had begun as guilds of stonemasons who worked on medieval cathedrals. Freemasons tend to be fascinated by the doings of ancient civilisations, by arcane emblems, and by what one might call the occult. Hence, it’s unsurprising they’re keen on Ancient Egypt – the ancient civilisation par excellence, with its mysterious hieroglyphs, intriguing religion, and powerful magical and metaphysical traditions. Also, the Egyptians had been experts in architecture and working in stone. When examining Cleopatra’s Needle, Gorringe discovered what he thought were ancient Masonic signs and seems to have persuaded himself that these hieroglyphs were attempts of Ancient Egyptian Freemasons to send messages to the Masons of the future. Gorringe, therefore, became convinced he had to get the obelisk over to New York to make its teachings available to America’s Masons.

Gorringe teamed up with Elbert Farman – the US Consul to Egypt – and they persuaded the Khedive to offer them Cleopatra’s Needle. With Egypt suffering deep financial problems – and eager to improve trade with the USA – the Khedive had little choice but to acquiesce. However, there was still opposition to Gorringe’s desire to remove the monolith. Britain and France objected to the upstart Americans acquiring an obelisk and discovered an eagerness to preserve Egypt’s heritage, lobbying the Egyptian authorities not to allow the artefact to go. In addition to this, the Egyptians themselves were growing more concerned about the carrying off of their inheritance. Demonstrations were organised and angry editorials appeared in newspapers. To top it all, an Italian man came forward claiming to own the land on which Cleopatra’s Needle stood – he was quietened by a threat from Gorringe to sue.

The Cleopatra’s Needle that would go to New York City still upright in the Caesareum in 1880. Its twin obelisk had already been removed to London.

Another potential source of friction had a more American tone. There was the possibility of debates in Congress, debates with the potential to delay the acquisition of Cleopatra’s Needle for years. An arrangement was therefore contrived by which the obelisk was directly gifted to the City of New York, thereby bypassing the threat of lengthy and tortuous disquisitions. The only problem remaining was how to facilitate and fund the transport of the monument, especially now that New York was expected to come up with the cash. Raising such a sum wasn’t guaranteed to be easy. The torch-bearing-arm of the Statue of Liberty was around that time exhibited in Madison Square Park, in an attempt to revive the stuttering campaign to generate the money to assemble the rest of the figure. However, as far as Cleopatra’s Needle was concerned, assistance soon arrived. The railroad magnate – and America’s richest man – William Vanderbilt stepped in and donated $100,000 (well over $3 million in modern money). Vanderbilt – a Freemason – helped select the site on which the obelisk would stand. Greywacke Knoll was chosen as Vanderbilt didn’t want the magnificent monolith overshadowed by growing city.

The challenge now was how to shift the obelisk and get it over the Atlantic to New York. Vanderbilt invited proposals on how this could be done and in August 1879, Gorringe was granted the commission. Gorringe first built a long wooden crate. After encasing Cleopatra’s Needle in this vast coffin, he used hydraulic jacks and various devices to lower it. The next problem was how to get the obelisk and its box to the Nile. Gorringe came up with a clever solution – he laid out a track of cannonballs and rolled the crate over them. Gorringe had bought an old Egyptian postal ship and reinforced its hull – and it was onto this ship he had Cleopatra’s Needle loaded. The monument’s pedestal and the stairs leading up to it were also hoisted on board. Unlike the disastrous voyage of Cleopatra’s Needle to London, the sea journey to New York was mostly hassle-free. On July 19th 1880, the postal ship with its ancient freight arrived off New York’s Fire Island.

Cleopatra’s Needle being loaded onto the modified postal ship to begin its voyage to New York City. It was slid onto the boat via a specially created portal in the hull.

The next day, a pilot boat guided the ship to Staten Island, where it passed through the quarantine station. Given the all-clear, the boat sailed up the Hudson River and docked at 23rd Street. New York had been ardently anticipating the artefact’s arrival, and while the boat was docked, 1700 people per day came aboard to gaze upon the monument. But even though Cleopatra’s Needle had been successful transported to New York, there was still the logistical issue of how to get it across the city to Central Park. The decision was made to first move the pedestal. The boat sailed further upriver to 51st Street, where a crane offloaded the 50-ton base onto a carriage. 32 horses dragged it through the city, with the carriage’s wheels carving deep grooves into the road due to the weight of its burden. The pedestal was, however, successfully put in place in Central Park, with the city now in even more of a ferment about its ancient acquisition. This would only be heightened when New York’s Masons put on a spectacular demonstration of reverence. Masonic mythology attaches great importance to the idea of cornerstones and the brotherhood were determined to welcome this very special foundation stone to their town.

Strange Masonic Rituals, Weird Occult Alignments and a Miniature Cleopatra’s Needle on a New York Grave

On October 9th 1880, a solemn procession of over 9,000 Masons and members of the Knights Templar paraded up 5th avenue to Central Park, with many clad in black clothes, tall hats, white gloves and aprons. A crowd of 50,000 lined the route. After the Masons arrived at the pedestal, a grand ceremony was conducted. Grain – symbolising plenty – was tipped over the stone. Next, the Grand Senior Mason poured on wine – symbolising joy – before his junior poured on oil, representing peace. The Grand Marshal then walked to each side of the platform and said: “In the name of the Grand Lodge of the State of New York, I now proclaim the cornerstone of this obelisk – known as Cleopatra’s Needle – duly laid in ample form.” On every side of the base, he recited these words three times, after which the mass of assembled Masons clapped their hands thrice. Grand Master Anthony then made a speech, all about the Ancient Egyptians and their pyramids and how they had the power to predict the future.

However, the Grand Master didn’t go as far as Gorringe in claiming a connection between Egypt’s ancient inhabitants and modern Freemasons. According to The New York Times: “The most remarkable part of the Grand Master’s address was that in which he disclaimed any Masonic origin for the hieroglyphics found upon the obelisk and this was a part of his oration, coming from such high Masonic authority, that could not have been edifying to those persons who have found – as are professed to believe – evidences of the existence of the Masonic Order at the time this obelisk was first erected.” Gorringe and others, as The New York Times implied, must have been gutted to hear the Grand Master’s words.

As for Cleopatra’s Needle itself, first the boat sailed to a dock on 96th Street, where the obelisk was floated from the ship catamaran-style on pontoons. To move the monument to its place in Central Park, Gorringe hit upon another ingenious idea. He had the obelisk rolled on railway-like tracks, with workers continually taking up the lengths of track behind and positioning them again in front of the monolith as it made its stately way through the city. In this manner, Cleopatra’s Needle covered approximately a block a day, taking 40 days in total to reach its destination. The most challenging part of the journey was when the obelisk had to get across the real railroad tracks of the Hudson River Railway. However, this railroad was part of a Vanderbilt-owned firm. One order from the tycoon halted the trains so the obelisk could lumber over the tracks. On January 5th 1881, Cleopatra’s Needle arrived at Greywacke Knoll.

The vast edifice was then kept suspended above the base, awaiting a ceremony set for January 22nd during which Gorringe himself would lower it onto its plinth. Gorringe had completed all the calculations, but remained anxious in case something might go wrong on his big day. So, on the night of January 20th, he crept into Central Park with a band of collaborators. They did a midnight test run, during which Gorringe was relieved to observe everything would be all right. On January 22nd – despite sub-zero temperatures – thousands of New Yorkers watched as the obelisk was manoeuvred into the position it still occupies today. As in London, a time capsule was placed beneath. Among other items, it contained the American Declaration of Independence, a set of military medals, and a guide to Egyptian and Masonic symbols.

Cleopatra’s Needle remains a popular attraction in Central Park, New York City (Photo: King of Hearts)

Since that time, Cleopatra’s Needle has remained a much-visited tourist site. The monument’s looming presence in the centre of New York helped fuel American Egyptomania into the 20th century, when the craze for all things Egyptian was again boosted by the British archaeologist Howard Carter’s discover of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. It seems the needle’s position outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art has had a galvanising impact on the Met’s collection. Perhaps not willing to be outdone by European museums, the Met financed expeditions to Egypt between 1906 and 1936. The Met boasts a phenomenal collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, including the Temple of Dendur. An exceptionally holy site seen as home to the gods, the temple was rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam and reassembled in the Met in the 1960s.

Questions, though, remain about the positioning of Cleopatra’s Needle. As early as 1923, newspapers were pointing out that the obelisk isn’t in exact alignment with the sun. (Egyptian obelisks have traditionally also functioned as sun dials.) It’s been argued, however, that this is no mistake and that a different – possibly Masonic – alignment has always been intended. According to the website Forgotten New York, there are three obelisks in Manhattan, though the other two are significantly younger than Cleopatra’s Needle. One of these monuments – found in the graveyard of St Paul’s Chapel – was constructed in the 1830s to commemorate Thomas Addis Emmet, an Irish lawyer and revolutionary and Attorney General of New York State. Although a cube-shaped chamber lies under the obelisk, Emmet isn’t interred there. Instead, he was buried at St Mark’s Church in the Bowery and later reburied in Ireland. The third obelisk – in Worth Square, at the junction of 25th Street, Fifth Avenue and Broadway – marks the resting place of General William Jenkins Worth (a powerful Freemason). This obelisk – which dates to 1857 and stands close to the Flat Iron Building – reaches 51 feet and is the second oldest monument in New York. All three obelisks, it’s claimed, align perfectly at 29 degrees east of north, with General Worth’s marking the line’s midpoint. Just one block away from the Worth Obelisk is … New York’s Masonic Hall and Grand Lodge. The reader must use their judgement to decide whether this is all a coincidence, a bizarre Masonic code or some sort of occult psychogeography.

The Worth Monument in New York City. This obelisk stands in alignment with Cleopatra’s Needle and the obelisk of Thomas Addis Emmet (Photo: Jim Henderson)

This section of the post would, however, be incomplete without mentioning at least one other obelisk. In 1885, Henry Honychurch Gorringe died at the age of just 43 as a result of injuries received when either trying to alight from or board a moving train. The more superstitious might see the curse of Cleopatra’s Needle in Gorringe’s demise – a curse expressed in the irony of Gorringe meeting his end courtesy of the invention that had made so much money for the man who’d financed the obelisk’s transport. Moreover, 1885 was the year in which Gorringe published his book Egyptian Obelisks, which mainly explored his acquisition of Cleopatra’s Needle for Central Park. However, Gorringe’s friends did not seem to perceive the dark shadow of the obelisk in his death. Gorringe was buried in Rockland Cemetery, Sparkhill, New York State. His memorial stone declares: “his crowning work was the removal of Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to the United States, a feat of engineering without parallel.” In 1886, his friends erected a replica of Cleopatra’s Needle over his grave. The unveiling ceremony drew 500 people and was widely reported in the press. The monument – decorated with Egyptian-style cartouches and with an illustration showing how Gorringe raised and lowered the needle – stands at over 25 feet and is of white granite. It cost $25,000 dollars (around $840,000 in today’s money) and – like the original obelisk in Central Park – it stands on its own knoll, from where it overlooks the Hudson River.

Why might these Strange Legends Have Grown up around Cleopatra’s Needles and Might the Obelisks Be Returning to Egypt?

Along with Egyptomania, there was a general idea that Egyptian artefacts were cursed. Thus, all the legends of cursed mummies inhabiting the museums and disturbing the private collectors of North America and Europe. One legend, for example, concerns an artefact known as the Unlucky Mummy that ended up in the British Museum. Said to be the remains of a priestess or princess called Amen-Ra, the Unlucky Mummy was held responsible for illnesses and deaths, and for actions as outlandish as haunting London Underground stations via secret tunnels, sinking the Titanic and starting the Second World War. It’s perhaps inevitable that an Ancient Egyptian object as imposing as Cleopatra’s Needle would generate tales of curses and vengeful ghosts. The London Cleopatra’s Needle especially, given its traumatic voyage to England, fitted into the ‘cursed object’ narrative. Hence the legend of the sphinxes trying to deflect its occult power. Though there seem to be less stories of ghosts and curses linked to the New York obelisk, we could ask whether the elaborate Masonic ceremonies that prepared the plinth for the monument’s arrival were not also intended to abate its paranormal influence. As non-Masons, I suppose, we can only speculate and never know.

A frequent suggestion for this association of unquiet spirits, unruly occult powers and potent curses with Egyptian artefacts is guilt over colonial plunder and exploitation. And how could these artefacts – the obelisks ripped from their temples, the mummy cases with their mournful eyes and affectingly human faces gazing accusingly across millennia – not be offended by being carried across seas and oceans to cold, far-off lands? The story of Cleopatra’s Needles is very much the story of militarism and empire. These monuments to Egyptian imperial might, crowing in hieroglyphs of military victories, were unsurprisingly sought out by later empires to celebrate their conquests and triumphs. Carved on the base of the London obelisk is:

“This obelisk

Prostrate for centuries

on the sands of Alexandria

was presented to the

British nation A.D. 1819 by

Mohommed Ali, Viceroy of Egypt

A worthy memorial of

our distinguished countrymen

Nelson and Abercromby”

Britain and France – as well as batting for territory and influence in Egypt – also battled for its artefacts, the larger and more prestigious the better. As America was beginning to feel its status as the new and rising empire on the block, it inevitably wanted an obelisk of its own.

We might question, however, if Cleopatra’s Needles will always remain in Central Park and beside the murky Thames, with its tidal rise and fall perhaps a modest imitation of the mighty fluctuations of the Nile. Concern has been voiced about the condition of the artefacts in their foreign homes. The American needle especially is somewhat worn, with its hieroglyphs quite faded. Already blasted by the sands of the Libyan Desert – unlike its London cousin it wasn’t protected for centuries by lying under sand in the Caesareum – it has suffered from New York’s harsher climate, with its hotter summers and colder winters than London. There was also a disastrous attempt to renovate it in 1885, when it was covered in gasoline and 700 pounds of granite were chiselled away, a process that probably damaged or removed a good few hieroglyphs. In 2011, the needle was inspected by Zahi Hawass – the Minister of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities – who penned a letter declaring: “If the Central Park Conservancy and the City of New York cannot properly care for the obelisk, I will take the necessary steps to bring this precious artefact home and save it from ruin.” Though the London obelisk is in a somewhat better state, a comment from Hawass in 2018 suggested he was also less than impressed with its condition: “I went to see it yesterday and I was ashamed … If they don’t care, they should return it.”

The hieroglyphs on the Central Park Cleopatra’s Needle have become worn thanks to the New York climate, acid rain, air pollution and misguided attempts at renovation (Photo: Captain-tucker)

For now, however, the obelisks are likely to remain in position and these imported monuments will doubtless continue to form a central part of the networks of myth, folklore, imagination and foreboding that run through both cities. It’s as if the monoliths are immense pins holding in place these strange threads of energy and power. Or, as Jack the Ripper puts it in From Hell: “They call it Cleopatra’s Needle. He who’d wield it would the BEST of tailors be, to do its work, increase the Sun God’s sovereignty … encoded in this city’s stones are symbols thunderous enough to rouse the sleeping Gods submerged beneath the sea-bed of our dreams.”

This article’s main image shows Cleopatra’s Needle in London. (Photo: Colin Smith)

The post Cleopatra’s Needle – London & New York’s Cursed & Haunted Egyptian Obelisks appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Physicians, alchemists and surgeons brimmed with praise for the substance. The philosopher and pioneering scientist Francis Bacon (1521-1626) declared ‘mummy hath great force in staunching of blood’. Robert Boyle (1627-91) – the ‘father of modern chemistry’ – believed mummia was ‘one of the most useful medicines commended and given by our physicians for falls and bruises’. Mummia, it was claimed, could heal sicknesses as diverse as coughs, ‘pungent pains of the spleen’, hysteria, diarrhoea, ‘inflammation of the body’ and epilepsy, as well as aiding childbirth. The French king François I (1494-1547) took a pouch with him everywhere containing a mix of mummia and pulverised rhubarb. François feared ‘no accident if he had a little of that by him’ and asserted his weird concoction could deal with headaches, stomach upsets and even fractured bones.

A jar for mummia from an 18th-century apothecary’s shop. (Photo: Bullenwachter)

But Europeans weren’t just content with making ointments from millennia-old mummies or swallowing their powdered remnants in wine. The art world also sought mummia out. Painters prized a pigment made from the substance called mummy brown. A rich brown hue – which fell between the shades of burnt and raw umber – mummy brown was said to be good for glazes, shadows, shading and (yes) flesh tones. Mummy brown was popular among the Pre-Raphaelites and was available in London art shops as late as the 1960s.

But how did the outlandish and revolting idea arise that ancient human flesh could soothe health problems? Was everybody always convinced of mummia’s curative properties and when did learned opinion start to doubt the drug’s wholesomeness? What well-known paintings feature the macabre substance and why did artists eventually stop daubing the remains of ‘priests and Pharaohs’ onto their canvases?

Read on to learn of paints made from pulverised French monarchs, of aristocratic parties at which mummies were ‘unrolled’ before enraptured audiences, and of a mysterious lifeforce some believed could be transferred from mummy to patient. Continue reading to find out why mummia’s critics condemned it as a ‘diet of dismal vampirism’ and how one compassionate painter even gave a solemn burial to a tube of mummy brown.

Did the Obsession with Mummia Arise from Translation Blunders and Scientific Mistakes?

The idea that mummies could be ground down into a cure-all drug is certainly a strange one. Though the Ancient Egyptians were mummifying humans and animals as long ago as 3000 BC, mummified remains didn’t become a feature of European medicine until the High Middle Ages. The craze for mummia seems to have at first evolved from a more innocent and – somewhat – less disgusting source: an interest in the medical properties of bitumen.

Bitumen is a naturally occurring, pitch-like mineral (a form a petroleum or asphalt) that bubbled up from a few spots in the Near and Middle East. The Greeks – and others in the Ancient World – believed bitumen had therapeutic qualities. Proclaimed as a treatment for conditions ranging from dysentery to toothache, bitumen was extolled by such weighty authorities as the Roman historian and naturalist Pliny the Elder and the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides. Arab and Persian doctors later used bitumen for ailments including cuts, bruises, bone fractures, stomach ulcers and tuberculosis. During the Crusades, European soldiers learned of the drug’s remarkable attributes, especially its efficacy in healing cuts and fractures. They carried this knowledge home, thereby making demand for bitumen soar. This – combined with the scarcity of the mineral – created a problem of supply. The few sites where the substance seeped from the earth – such as a mountain in Persia and the floor of the Dead Sea – were unable to satisfy the new European appetite for the medicine.

Natural bitumen collected from the shore of the Dead Sea – the original mummia? (Photo: Daniel Tzvi)

People, then, began to search for alternative sources of this rare – and increasingly costly – mineral. The Ancient Egyptians were known to have used bitumen as an embalming agent – they’d indeed applied it to their dead from the Twelfth Dynasty (1991-1802 BC) onwards.  The idea, therefore, arose that the commodity could be obtained by rifling ancient tombs and scraping the substance from their long-dead tenants.

The Arab physician, historian and philosopher Abd’ el-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162-1231) bears much responsibility for popularising this notion. Latif wrote of a substance that ‘in the belly and skull of these corpses is also found in great abundance called mummy’. (Mum or mumiya – the Persian word for bitumen – is where the English word ‘mummy’ comes from.) Although Latif stressed the term ‘mummy’ usually denoted bitumen that had oozed from the ground, he added, ‘The mummy found in the hollows of corpses in Egypt differs but immaterially from the nature of mineral mummy; and where any difficulty arises in procuring the latter, may be substituted in its stead.’ It seems Latif, however, confused the sludgy black liquid that occasionally seeps from embalmed corpses with the bitumen the Egyptians used as a preserving agent. In reality, the two are different substances.

Refined asphalt or bitumen – the Ancient Egyptians used ‘mummia’ of this sort to help preserve their dead. (Photo: Burger)

Some European writers and translators made a rather different error. Instead of, like Latif, believing that mineral bitumen could be salvaged from ancient mummies, they thought the health-giving ‘mummia’ was actually produced by the mummies themselves. The Italian translator Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187) erroneously defined the Arabic word mumiya as ‘the substance found in the land where bodies were buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with aloes, is transformed, and it is similar to marine pitch.’ In his translation of the 12th-century Arab physician Serapion the Younger, Simon Geneunsis (died 1303) wrote, ‘Mummia, this is the mummia of the sepulchres with aloes and myrrh mixed with the liquid (humidiate) of the human body.’ According to Matthaeus Platearius – a teacher at the medical school in Salerno and author of the popular herbal manual Circa Instans  – ‘Mummia is a spice found in the sepulchres of the dead … That is best which is black, ill-smelling, shiny and massive.’

Over time, these mistakes were compounded, with people coming to think of mummia as not just the hardened secretions of the corpse or its residues of bitumen, but as the dried embalmed flesh of the whole cadaver. Therefore, any Ancient Egyptian mummy could be ground down to make the in-demand drug. (The fact that mumiya in Arabic can mean both ‘the kind of bitumen used medically’ and ‘a bitumen-embalmed body’ may have added to this confusion.) The Italian surgeon Giovani da Vigo (1450-1525) described mummia as: ‘The flesh of a dead body which is embalmed, and it is hot and dry … it has virtue to heal over wounds and staunch blood.’

Such errors, not surprisingly, led to a scramble to acquire Ancient Egyptian corpses. The age-old dead became a prized commodity. Let’s take a look at how this gruesome trade manifested itself and how some mummia might not have been quite as ancient or authentic as those gulping it down or rubbing it on their wounds would have liked to believe.

The Heyday of Mummia and the Disreputable Trade in Medicinal Mummies

By the 1500s, merchants – Spaniards, Frenchmen, Britons, Germans and others – were making massive profits shipping mummies, whole or in parts, out of Alexandria and Cairo. Both Egyptians and foreigners ransacked tombs seeking the lucrative cadavers.

In 1586, the London merchant John Sanderson – an agent for the Turkey Company – described the hunting out of the precious sources of mummia: ‘We were let down by ropes, as into a well, with waxe-candles burning in our hands, and so walked upon the bodies of all sorts and sizes … they gave no noisome smell at all … I broke off all the parts of the bodies to see how the flesh was turned to drugge, and brought home divers heads, hands, armes and feet, for a shew: we brought also 600 pounds for the Turkie Company in pieces; and brought into England in the Heracles: together with a whole body: they are lapped in above a hundred double of cloth, which rotting and pilling off, you may see the skin, flesh, fingers and nayles firme, altered blacke. One little hand I brought into England, to shew; and presented it to my brother, who gave the same to a doctor in Oxford.’

The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in 1668 of seeing an Egyptian mummy in London before it was ground into powder: ‘And so parted, I having seen a mummy in a merchant’s warehouse there, all the middle of the man or woman’s body black and hard. I never saw any before, and, therefore, it pleased me much, though an ill sight; and he did give me a little bit, the bone of an arme.’

A mummy dealer in Egypt, photographed in 1875

The demand for mummia was, however, so phenomenal that Egypt’s once plentiful reserves of ancient corpses were being depleted. The temptation was, therefore, great for traders to offer mummies of a much more recent vintage. As early as 1564, the French physician Guy de La Fontiane – who worked for the King of Navarre – examined around 40 mummies held by a Jewish dealer in Alexandria. La Fontiane found many had been manufactured from recently deceased individuals, such as executed criminals and slaves. The corpses had been coated and filled with bitumen then exposed to the sun to create mummified tissue.

Another merchant, when asked if any of his mummies had died of horrific illnesses, said he ‘cared not whence they came, whether they were old or young, male or female, or of what disease they had died, so long as he could obtain them … when embalmed no one could tell.’ Traders sometimes even sold non-human remains. Mummified ibises could masquerade as ‘mummified children’ while other mummies incorporated camel flesh. According to Pierre Pomet’s A compleat history of drugges (1712), some mummies were made from the sun-dried bodies of travellers who’d been caught in sand storms.

Despite the dubiousness of many of the mummies that reached Europe, much medical opinion remained enthusiastic about mummia. Two fistfuls of the powder could, apparently, help with epilepsy, vertigo and palsy. Mummia – soaked in wine and turpentine – could act as a ‘counter-poyson’  and guard against plague and ‘all manner of infection’. According to Bechler’s Parnassus Medicinalis (1663), ‘Mummy dissolves coagulated blood, relieves cough and pain in the spleen, and is very beneficial in flatulency and delayed menstruation.’

A wooden container for mummia from the collection of an apothecary, displayed in Hamburg Museum, Germany. (Photo: Christoph Braun)

The physician John Hall – the son-in-law of none other than William Shakespeare – treated a patient’s epilepsy by getting them to inhale the smoke of ‘a mixture of aromatic resin, powdered mummy, black pitch and juice of rue’. Catherine de Medici, the Queen Consort of France, was so convinced of the curative effects of mummia she sent her physician to Egypt in 1549 to obtain a supply. Among the many medical problems mummia was said to ease were withering and contractions of the joints, ‘hardness of the cicatrices’ (the scars of old wounds), catarrh, the marks left by measles, difficult labours and diseases of the head.

We might wonder why, beyond mummia’s association with bitumen, people ascribed such wondrous health benefits to ingesting powdered pieces of Egyptian cadavers. There seems to have been an idea that mummies contained a mystical lifeforce that could boost the vitality of ailing patients. This, no doubt, partly came from the widespread notion that the Ancient Egyptians had understood many occult secrets and mysteries of the cosmos, an understanding they particularly expressed through their rituals of death, mummification and burial. But there also seems to have been a more general idea that by consuming a being’s flesh, a person could take on that being’s attributes. Eating the meat of a bear, for instance, could give you something of that creature’s courage and strength. The influential 16th-century Swiss alchemist and physician Paracelsus propagated this notion and felt the principle also applied to our own species. He, however, recommended medicine made from fresh corpses rather than ancient mummies, stating, ‘If doctors were aware of the power of this substance, no body would be left on the gibbet for more than three days.’

A disciple of Paracelsus, Johann Schroder – physician, pharmacologist and the first person to recognise that arsenic is an element – entertained similar beliefs. Schroder advocated gulping down medicine made from ‘the cadaver of a reddish man (because in such a man the blood is believed to be lighter and so the flesh is better), whole, fresh without blemish, of around 24-years-of-age, dead of a violent death (not of illness), exposed to the moon’s rays for one day and one night.’ The flesh should be treated so that it ‘resembles smoke-cured meat, without any stench’. Oswald Croll – an alchemist and professor of medicine at the University of Marburg – stated that mummia wasn’t ‘the liquid matter which is found in Egyptian sepulchres’ but argued it should be acquired from ‘the flesh of a man that perishes a violent death’. He had a recipe for making the substance from the body of a young red-headed man who’d been bludgeoned on a breaking wheel, hanged and exposed to the air for several days. Croll recommended the flesh should be chopped into small pieces, sprinkled with powdered myrrh and aloes, marinated in wine then dried.

Some writers, on the other hand, felt the best medicine was procured from young ‘unsullied’ females. In the early 1600s, the physician Pietro de la Valle claimed the best mummia came from ‘maidens and bodies of virgins’. As late as 1824, the French writer and historian Jean-Baptiste-Bonaventure de Roquefort concurred with this opinion. In Shakespeare’s Othello, Desdemona’s handkerchief is ‘dyed in mummy which the skilful conserved of maidens’ hearts.’

Despite authorities stating that good mummia could be obtained in Europe itself, the mystic lure of Ancient Egypt was strong and recent European corpses were often passed off as originating from the land of the Pharaohs. The barber surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510-90)  – a royal doctor and one of the ‘fathers of modern surgery’ – exposed the production of fake mummia in France, finding that apothecaries had been stealing the corpses of executed convicts, putting them in ovens and selling the dried flesh. Paré also came across similar practices in Egypt. One merchant, who confessed to making mummies from the recently departed, expressed astonishment that Christians ‘so dainty-mouthed could eat the bodies of the dead’.

Many European Christians, though, were in agreement with the conman Paré interviewed, feeling mummia was a disgusting and dangerous medicine. Read on to learn of how Shakespeare and other playwrights disparaged the drug, of the doctors and preachers who ranted against it, and of how precious Egyptian mummies gradually came to be put to a more exhibitionistic use.

The Questioning of Mummia’s Health-bestowing Benefits, Shakespeare’s Disapproval and the Stripping of Mummies for Show

Paré admitted to administering mummia to at least a hundred of his patients, but he was to become critical of the medicine. He thundered against ‘this wicked kind of drugge’ that not only ‘doth nothing to help the diseased’ but could actually be injurious to the health, causing ‘many troublesome symptomes, such as paine of the heart or stomacke, vomiting and stinke of the mouth’. Paré stopped prescribing mummia and urged other doctors to do likewise. Renaissance scholars were also becoming aware of the translation mistakes that had sparked much of the enthusiasm for mummia. The French naturalist Pierre Belon (1517-1564) pointed out that when Arab physicians had written of mummia, they’d been referring to pissasphalt (mineral pitch or asphalt) rather than the scrapings of ancient corpses or the powdered remains of bodies dried in the sun. In 1597, the English herbalist John Gerard also stressed that ‘mummia’ was in reality pissasphalt and accused the translator of Serapion the Younger of describing the drug ‘according to his owne fancie’. In 1599, the preacher Richard Hakluyt lamented that ‘these dead bodies are the mummie which the Phisitians and Apothecaries do against our willes make us to swallow.’

The philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in 1658 launched a blistering critique of the trade in mummia: ‘The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams … Surely such diet is dismal vampirism; and exceeds in horror the black banquet of Domitian, not to be paralleled except in those Arabian feasts, wherein Ghouls feed horribly.’ In 1546, the German physician Leonhard Fuchs complained about people ingesting ‘the gory matter of cadavers received evidently from the gallows or the torture wheel, spotted with the faeces of corpses in place of aloes and myrrh.’

A distaste for mummia can also be found in Renaissance literature and drama. In Macbeth, Shakespeare – despite his son-in-law’s enthusiasm for the substance – has his witches add ‘witches’ mummy’ to their diabolical cauldron along with unsavoury ingredients like ‘gall of goat’, ‘eye of newt’, ‘tongue of dog’ and ‘finger of birth-strangled babe’. In James Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage (1633) a character exclaims, ‘Make a mummy of my flesh and sell me to the apothecaries’. In Ben Johnson’s Volpone, it’s also suggested that a body should be sold ‘for mummia, he’s half-dust already’. Perhaps the most gruesome mummia-related lines come from John Webster’s The White Devil:

‘Your followers

Have swallowed you, like mummia, and being sick

With such unnatural and horrid physic,

Vomit you up i’ th’ kennel.’

Despite the disapproval of certain physicians, writers and intellectuals, the medical use of mummia only declined gradually as more scientific and less mythical modes of thinking seeped into society. Mummia’s popularity may have also dipped thanks to suspicions the drug exacerbated plague outbreaks in the 1600s. Another factor may, however, have been changing notions regarding the value of Ancient Egyptian mummies and artefacts.

Towards the end of the 18th century, the colonial opening up of Egypt and advances in archaeology led to ‘Egyptomania’ – an obsession with Ancient Egypt that swept across Europe. Egyptian themes featured in operas, novels and plays; Egyptian designs appeared on crockery, jewellery and furniture; and Egyptian-influenced mausoleums – including miniature pyramid tombs – sprang up in churchyards and cemeteries. Mummies themselves became desirable possessions rather than primarily being seen as sources of a drug, a drug which was anyway viewed with more and more scepticism. Tourist trips to Egypt increased and many of these tourists were determined to bring back souvenirs of ancient pedigree. Bits of Egyptian mummies had long been considered collectable – as we’ve seen from the attitudes of Samuel Pepys and John Sanderson – and would sometimes form part of a gentleman’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’. In 1639, an observer described one such collection as containing two ribs of a whale, a preserved pelican, the hand of a mermaid and the hand of a mummy. But as Egyptomania took hold – especially following Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1798 – this thirst for mummified artefacts intensified.

Victorian tourists relax in Egypt, around 1890

In his Egypt of the Pharaohs (1974), Brian Fagan reports that ‘diplomats and tourists, merchants and dukes, all vied with one another to assemble spectacular collections of mummies and other antiquities.’ This obsession resulted in ‘ferocious rivalry, and the competitors could frequently be seen clambering over stones and broken sarcophagi, rooting through rubble and bartering with boys whose pockets were stuffed with ancient remains.’ Egyptian entrepreneurs had once supplied mummies of dubious antiquity to Europeans eager to make medicine. Now local businessmen reacted to the tourist influx by scattering visitor hotspots with mummies and artefacts transported from elsewhere to make sure that no travellers left disappointed. In 1833, the French abbot Father Géramb commented, ‘It would hardly be respectable, on one’s return from Egypt, to present oneself without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other.’

But mummies could have an even more bizarre use than decorating aristocratic houses or furnishing gentlemen’s curiosity cabinets. They could prove quite a social attraction as the centrepiece of ‘mummy unrolling’ occasions. These events would consist of an ‘expert’ – usually a doctor or academic – divesting a mummy of its bandages in front of a fascinated audience. The unwrappings could range from sober sessions in lecture rooms to little more than ghoulish sources of entertainment at private parties. Often the unrollings would be something in between, combining a concern for education and science with elaborate showmanship. Thomas ‘Mummy’ Pettigrew – a surgeon, author, antiquarian and treasurer of the British Archaeological Society – started unrolling mummies and conducting autopsies upon them in a lecture theatre in London’s Charing Cross Hospital. Soon, however, he was unwrapping the ancient cadavers at private gatherings and public exhibitions – events which almost always sold out and had people turned away at the door. By 1848, Pettigrew was thought to have unrolled as many as 50 mummies.

The Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret Murray and her team unwrap the mummy of Khnum-Nakht in front of 500 people in a University of Manchester lecture theatre in 1908.

These mummy-unrolling rituals weren’t limited to England. The French novelist and critic Théophile Gautier attended a mummy unwrapping in 1857. He noted the ‘faint, delicate odour of balsam, incense and other aromatic drugs’ and how ‘a vast quantity of linen filled the room, and we could not help wondering how a box which was scarcely larger than an ordinary coffin had managed to hold it all.’ Gautier was shaken by the mummy’s eyes: ‘two white eyes with great black pupils shone with fictitious life between brown eyelids. They were enamelled eyes, such as it was customary to insert in carefully prepared mummies. The clear, fixed glance, gazing out of the dead face, produced a terrifying effect; the body seemed to behold with disdainful surprise the living beings that moved around it.’ Théophile related how ‘little by little the body began to show its sad nudity … is it not a surprising thing … to see on a table, in still appreciable shape, a being which walked in the sunshine, which lived and loved 500 years before Moses, 2,000 years before Jesus Christ?’

A mummy unwrapping session in Cairo in 1886 – note the fashionable lady spectator

But if mummies had largely become objects of touristic enthusiasm or items to be plundered and carried back to Europe to be either unwrapped or displayed, what of the powder mummia? Did Europeans finally stop grinding up the ancient dead? Mummia did continue to have a function even though far fewer people swallowed it as a drug. To understand that purpose, we’ll need to look to the world of fine art.

Mummia as an Artists’ Pigment – the Burial of ‘Mummy Brown’ and Painting with Ground-up French Kings

For some time, European artists had been using a paint known as ‘mummy brown’ – a rich brown bituminous pigment. This paint – also called Egyptian brown and caput mortuum (dead man’s head) – seems to have been developed in the 16th or 17th century. It was made from myrrh, white pitch and – ground-up Ancient Egyptian mummies. As with medical mummia, however, high demand could result in less-than-authentic mummies being used. Sometimes the mummies of cats replaced those of humans; sometimes the bodies of recently deceased criminals and slaves found their way into the paint. On occasion, mummies from the Canary Islands substituted the Egyptian variety – the aboriginal people of the islands, the Guanche, had also embalmed their dead.

Opinions about mummy brown differed. Some artists felt it had good transparency and was good for glazes, shadows, flesh tones and shading. It was said to ‘flow from the brush with delightful freedom and evenness’. The pigment, however, varied in quality, with the paint from some batches prone to cracking. As mummy brown contained ammonia and particles of fat, it could sully other colours. One critic complained that ‘these crumbled remains of dead bodies’ were ‘more or less liable to injure the colours with which they may be united’ before concluding there was ‘nothing to be gained by smearing our canvas with a part perhaps of the wife of Potiphar, that might not be as easily secured by materials less frail and of more sober character.’

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830) might well have been painted with mummy brown.

The variability in mummy brown’s composition makes it difficult to know which paintings it appears in, but mummy brown was fashionable from the mid-18th to the late-19th century. Delacroix is known to have used it, the British portraitist William Beechey had stocks of the substance, and it was used by the Anglo-Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites. One work that made much use of mummy brown was Interior of a Kitchen (1815) by the French painter Martin Drolling. Drolling’s mummy brown is rumoured to have come from an astonishing source. The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis (now in a Paris suburb) also served as a royal necropolis and almost every French monarch from the 10th century onwards had been buried there. After the French Revolution, the government ordered the destruction of the royal sepulchres. The royal bodies – some of which were exceptionally well-preserved – were yanked from their tombs, hurled into pits and covered with quick lime. But some workmen, apparently, couldn’t resist grabbing ‘souvenirs’. These mementoes allegedly included jaws, sections of skulls, nails, moustaches, Henry III’s teeth, Phillipe Auguste’s hair and an entire arm of Catherine de Medici. Some of the royal remains are said to have ended up transformed into mummy brown and – according to legend – Drolling daubed this very paint onto his canvas.

Martin Drolling’s Interior of a Kitchen (1815) – was it painted with mummy brown made from the corpses of French monarchs?

Mummy brown was popular with the Pre-Raphaelites, especially with Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98). It seems Burne-Jones was, however, using the pigment while unaware of its gruesome origins. According to a book by his widow Georgina, Burne-Jones had invited Alma-Tadema for Sunday lunch with his family. After the meal, the two men discussed colours. Georgina wrote, ‘Mr Tadema startled us by saying that he had lately been invited to go and see a mummy that was in his colourman’s workshop before it was ground down into paint.’ Burne-Jones scoffed at the notion that the pigment ‘had anything to do with a mummy’ and ‘said the name must only be borrowed to describe a particular shade of brown.’ When, Georgina maintains, Tadema managed to convince Burne-Jones the paint really was made from mummies, Burne-Jones ‘left us at once, hastened to the studio, and returning with the only tube he had, insisted on our giving it a decent burial there and then. So a hole was bored in the green grass at our feet, and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it.’

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones (1880-98), which was probably painted using mummy brown.

Another person present at the lunch was Georgina’s nephew, a young Rudyard Kipling. Kipling recalled Burne-Jones descending ‘in broad daylight with a tube of mummy brown in his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharaohs and we must bury it accordingly. So we all went out and helped – according to the rites of Mizraim and Memphis, I hope – and to this day I could drive a spade to within a foot of where that tube lies.’

The use of the pigment declined in the early 20th century as more artists – like Burne-Jones – learned of its unsavoury composition and respect for the historical, archaeological and cultural value of mummies increased. Mummy brown was, however, available to those who really wanted it for a surprisingly long time. This may have been due to the fact that large quantities of paint could be produced from just a few mummies. In 1915, one colourman stated that a single mummy had kept his customers supplied with the pigment for two decades. The famous colour-makers Roberson’s of London stocked the paint until the early 1960s though demand by that time was very low. In 1963, the firm had to remove the pigment from its catalogue because it had finally run out of mummies. ‘We might have a few odd limbs lying about somewhere,’ the director said, ‘but not enough to make any more paint. We sold our last complete mummy some years ago for, I think, £3. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. We certainly can’t get any more.’ Though you can purchase a modern pigment called mummy brown, it’s made of kaolin, quartz, goethite and hematite – with no taint of desiccated cadavers.

But what of the medical use of mummia? By the early 1700s, the drug’s popularity was in sharp decline. The English medical author John Quincy wrote in 1718 that although mummia was listed in medical catalogues, ‘it is quite out of prescription’. So does this mean that the mania for mummia, that the belief that ingesting ancient corpses can boost our health, belongs solely to a superstitious past? This doesn’t entirely appear to be the case. The substance could be found as late as 1924 on the price list of the large pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. Even more incredibly, in 1973 a shop in New York that sold ‘witches’ supplies’ was offering what it claimed was powered mummy. Although Ancient Egypt’s magic and mystique seem destined to haunt the Western consciousness for some time to come, let’s hope our obsession with this culture will never again focus on edible artefacts.

(This article’s main image is a photo from the excavation of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1923. The king’s mummy wasn’t ground up to make mummia or mummy brown.)

The post Mummia – How Ground Egyptian Mummy Cured All Ailments & Painted Masterpieces appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

This wooden casket – depicting the enigmatic face of a woman – is adorned with winged gods and hieroglyphs, their colours vibrant almost 3,000 years after being painted. You might be tempted to pause, to stare at the artefact. But maybe, after some time, though you wouldn’t want to yank away your gaze, you might become aware of a disturbing feeling, a mix of foreboding and fascination that grows more ominous the longer you look. Prickles could pass over your skin, your heart start to rap. Reluctantly, but thankfully, you might then haul away your eyes and drift on to other exhibits, but your weird encounter with the mummy case, and perhaps thoughts about its occupant, might linger for hours, days afterwards, cropping up in your dreams and invading quiet moments.

You wouldn’t be the first to feel this way. This object – given the identification number 22542 and currently displayed in room 62 of the museum – is at the centre of an extraordinary tangle of London folklore. Known as the ‘Unlucky Mummy’, this cursed artefact is said to have brought death, illness, injuries, bankruptcies and deep unhappiness to many who came into contact with it. It’s said to have smashed glass, spookily distorted photos, and created strange nocturnal lights and eerie footsteps in the houses it was kept in.

The Unlucky Mummy displayed in the British Museum (Image courtesy of amanderson2)

After its donation to the British Museum, the Unlucky Mummy caused more deaths and accidents. Night-time knockings, shrieks and moans reverberated from the case. One legend asserts the Unlucky Mummy’s ghost travelled down secret passageways to haunt two London Underground Stations and was responsible for the disappearance of two women at one of those Tube stops. Some stories even maintain the mummy was on the Titanic and that it was the mummy’s curse that sank that famous ship. It’s claimed the Unlucky Mummy is the corpse of an Ancient Egyptian princess, who was also a priestess of the powerful sun god Amen-Ra. The potent magic and occult knowledge she learnt in this role allegedly made sure that all those responsible for removing her from her tomb and keeping her from her resting place were pursued and punished.

But where exactly did the Unlucky Mummy come from and how did it find its way to the British Museum? Could there be any truth in the outlandish stories attached to the artefact and – if not entirely accurate – where might these tales have originated? Read on to learn of ominous warnings from palm readers, of Victorian seances in the British Museum’s Egyptian Room, of the beginnings of lurid tabloid journalism, and of the tragic misfiring of shotguns in the marshes of the Nile.

The Ominous Legend of Amen-Ra, the British Museum’s Unlucky Mummy

A number of similar, but varying, stories tell of how the Unlucky Mummy was discovered, brought to England and ended up in the British Museum. Below is an attempt to weave these legends into a coherent narrative.

These accounts centre on one Thomas Douglas Murray (1841-1912), a wealthy Oxford graduate, author, horse breeder and amateur archaeologist. Fascinated with all things Ancient Egyptian, Murray had been in the habit of frequenting Cairo and exploring Egypt. It’s said that as a young man, Murray visited the palmist and astrologer Count Louis Hamon, otherwise known as ‘Cheiro’. The moment Cheiro took hold of his customer’s right hand, he’s reputed to have experienced foreboding and great fear, feeling that the hand would one day be separated from its owner. The palmist had visions of the hand drawing a valuable prize and of a succession of calamities following this event.

Most stories state that in the 1860s – though some place the occurrence as late as the 1880s – Murray travelled to Cairo with two companions. There they met an Arab who showed them the coffin of a freshly excavated mummy. Murray was enchanted with the well-preserved casket, dazzled by how wonderfully it was decorated in gold and enamel and by the queenly features of the young woman depicted on it. Examining the casket more closely, Murray concluded its hieroglyphs stated that the woman was a princess and high-priestess of Amen-Ra. Not only that, but the picture writing declared the princess herself was named ‘Amen-Ra’ after the god she followed. All three Englishmen yearned to purchase the splendid artefact and the Arab was eager to sell. The friends agreed that they’d draw lots and that the winner would then get to bargain for the coffin. Murray won, negotiated the relic’s price and had the case packed up and sent to England that evening.

The Unlucky Mummy, the notorious cursed exhibit of the British Museum

The Englishmen next headed up the Nile to enjoy some duck shooting. But Murray’s gun exploded, injuring his right arm. He hurried back to Cairo to seek medical attention, but his progress was hampered by weirdly powerful headwinds. What should have been a straightforward journey took 10 days and by the time Murray made it to Cairo gangrene had infected the wound. To halt the disease’s spread, his arm had to be amputated. After Murray had recovered somewhat, the three decided to return to England. Before they set off, however, they heard disturbing rumours about the man who’d discovered Murray’s mummy in Luxor. He’d either died shortly after touching its bandages or had walked off into the desert in a daze never to be seen again. Two Egyptian servants who’d handled the mummy case – and been somewhat disrespectful towards its occupant – would be dead within a year and another servant who’d cracked a joke about the mummy would meet his doom even more quickly.

On the voyage back to Britain, both Murray’s friends died and were buried at sea. On reaching his London house, and feeling far from well himself, Murray saw that the mummy’s casket had been unpacked and was waiting for him in the hallway. Rather than being struck by the beautiful craftsmanship that had so bewitched him in Cairo, Murray now sensed the artefact emanated an ancient malignity. Murray couldn’t shake the notion that an atmosphere of foreboding and evil had settled on his house. Some say that during this time Murray – who had an interest in spiritualism – was visited by the Russian occultist and founder of the Theosophy movement Madame Blavatsky (1831-91). Blavatsky immediately felt ‘an evil influence of incredible intensity’. On being asked if she could exorcise the Unlucky Mummy, Blavatsky said, ‘There is no such thing as exorcism. Evil remains evil forever. Nothing can be done about it. I implore you to get rid of this evil as soon as possible.’

Murray was, then, probably relieved when a journalist writing an article about him asked to borrow Amen-Ra’s casket. Soon after the Unlucky Mummy entered her house, her mother tumbled down some stairs and died. The journalist’s fiancé broke off their engagement, her prize dogs went mad and she became ill. She sent Amen-Ra back to Murray.

Murray, perhaps somewhat unethically, palmed the Unlucky Mummy off on a friend, a Mr Wheeler. Wheeler was deluged by misfortunes and soon died broken-hearted. Before his death, Wheeler had passed the mummy on to a married sister. Amen-Ra’s arrival in her house heralded an inevitable string of unfavourable events, but she was still fascinated enough by the casket to take it to a Baker Street studio to have it photographed. She was horrified to learn that ‘when the plate was developed, although the negative had not been touched in any way, it was seen that there looked out the face of a living Egyptian woman, whose eyes stared furiously with an expression of singular malevolence.’ Not long afterwards, the photographer died suddenly and his son suffered an accident during which he was badly cut. When a man who’d purchased one of his photos of Amen-Ra brought it into to his house, every piece of glass in his home shattered. Another photographer unwise enough to take a picture of the Unlucky Mummy smashed his thumb and his assistant – while adjusting the camera – fell and cut his face.

The next time Wheeler’s sister met Murray, she poured out this list of gruesome goings-on. Finally realising it was unfair to keep lumbering his acquaintances with Amen-Ra, Murray suggested donating the mummy to the British Museum. But this proposal didn’t lessen Amen-Ra’s malice. Murray asked a friend, an Egyptologist, to organise the transfer of the mummy to the museum. This man couldn’t resist arranging for the coffin to have a stopover at his house so he could study it. He soon died, with a servant confiding that his master hadn’t slept since the Unlucky Mummy had entered his home. The carrier who brought the case containing Amen-Ra to the British Museum died within a week. While transporting the Unlucky Mummy, his truck hit and trapped a pedestrian as it reversed and a worker who helped unload the artefact broke his leg.

Victorian visitors examine Ancient Egyptian artefacts in the British Museum.

When Amen-Ra was put on display, the problems didn’t end. Nightwatchmen and cleaners reported poltergeist-like phenomena, with tappings, hammerings, moans and sobs coming from the casket. A journalist covering Amen-Ra’s story took a photo of her coffin in its glass display case. Again, the photograph revealed a woman’s face glowering with hatred. After showing the horrifying image to Sir Ernest Wallace Budge – the museum’s Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities – the journalist went home, locked himself in a room and shot himself. Others who dared to photograph or sketch the exhibit also suffered misfortunes. A nightwatchman died as did the child of a visitor who flicked a cloth at the Unlucky Mummy. One museum employee claimed that one evening at dusk he’d seen a figure suddenly sit up in the bottom half of the casket. A being with a hideous yellow face then glided towards him in a repulsively smooth motion. Thinking the entity was going to push him down a nearby trapdoor, the man sprang forward and the apparition vanished.

Sir Earnest A. Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum

According to the ghost-hunter Robert Thurston Hopkins, Budge grew increasingly worried by such reports and tried moving the Unlucky Mummy to see if this would help. Some accounts claim he sent Amen-Ra to the basement. During the Unlucky Mummy’s removal to the cellar, a man sprained his ankle and a week later the manager who’d supervised her demotion died in the museum at his desk. Most stories, however, state that Amen-Ra was simply moved from the display case she shared with other exhibits to a more prestigiously positioned case of her own. Her new home was completed with a flattering explanatory label. After this, it’s said, the disturbances became less dramatic and less frequent although for decades night cleaning staff reported ghostly appearances around the case and feelings of dread and terror emanating from it. As for Thomas Douglas Murray, the man who started all the trouble with his rash purchase of the Unlucky Mummy in Cairo, his problems didn’t cease after the British Museum accepted Amen-Ra. As the years passed, Murray’s fortune was whittled away and he died – bankrupt and in poverty – in 1912.

A Merging of Mummy Tales, Lashings of Journalistic Embellishment and a Seance in the British Museum’s Egyptian Rooms

Records indeed show the artefact that became known as the Unlucky Mummy was presented to the British Museum by a Mr A.F. Wheeler on behalf of a Mrs Warwick Hunt of Holland Park in 1890 (Wheeler’s married sister?). This, however, immediately throws doubt on the assertions Wheeler died soon after Murray had given him the mummy.

What appears to have happened is that accounts of the ‘Unlucky Mummy’ became meshed with tales of an entirely different Egyptian artefact that Murray had heard about. Murray came across the story of an Englishwoman who’d acquired an Egyptian mummy and displayed it in her drawing room. The morning after she’d installed it, she entered the room to find everything smashed. She moved the mummy to another room, only to have that room’s contents pulverised too. The mummy was exiled to the attic, but this didn’t halt the weird goings-on. That night, weighty footsteps tramped up and down the stairs, accompanied by eerie flickering lights. The following morning, all the lady’s servants quit.

This tale seems to have ignited Murray’s imagination. It’s unclear to what extent Murray really was involved with the purchase of the Unlucky Mummy and its journey to England. Some sources state he had no association with the object whatsoever until it ended up in the museum while others claim he bought Amen-Ra from an American millionaire collector of antiques, called James Carnegie. Carnegie was a patron of the famous German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who may have discovered the Unlucky Mummy during a dig. Whatever the truth, Murray – excited by the tale he’d heard and knowing Amen-Ra had recently been gifted to the British Museum – went to examine (or re-examine) the institution’s new artefact. He was accompanied by his friend, the famous – some would say notorious – journalist W.T. Stead.

The two men – both of whom had a deep interest in spiritualism – felt the face painted on Amen-Ra’s casket had an extremely sad look, going so far as to conclude ‘the expression on the face on the cover was that of a living soul in torment.’ This prompted Murray to contact the museum to ask if he and Stead could hold a seance in the Egyptian Section to attempt to contact the Unlucky Mummy’s spirit. According to Budge, ‘they wished to hold a seance … and to perform certain experiments with the object of removing the anguish and misery from the eyes of the coffin-lid.’

Mummies and other artefacts in the British Museum’s First Egyptian Room

W.T. Stead (1849-1912) was one of the first investigative journalists, whose style foreshadowed much of the shock, outrage and hyperbole that would characterise 20th-century tabloid-style reporting. He was also one of the earliest media figures to recognise that journalism could sway public opinion and as editor of The Pall Mall Gazette he ran a number of controversial campaigns.

The most famous of these was centred around a series of 1885 articles entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, which dealt with child prostitution. To prove the problem of child prostitution existed, Stead set up the ‘purchase’ of one Eliza Armstrong, the 13-year-old daughter of a chimney sweep. The first instalment in the four-part series warned that the next issues of The Pall Mall Gazette were certain to sell out. Stead was proved right – copies were swapped for 20 times their normal price, 10,000 customers besieged the Gazette‘s offices and the demand was so phenomenal the Gazette even ran out of printing paper. Though considered a hero by many for exposing this trade, Stead was sent to prison for abduction – on the ‘technical grounds’ that he hadn’t first obtained ‘permission’ for his purchase from Eliza’s father. He served three months in Coldbath and Holloway jails. His journalism, nevertheless, helped pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16. The bill was dubbed by many the ‘Stead Act’. Stead’s campaign against child prostitution is said to have inspired George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and even influenced Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The journalist WT Stead in later life. Did he help invent the Unlucky Mummy myth?

Stead pioneered the use of enormous attention-grabbing headlines and inserted maps and diagrams to break up lengthy articles. He’d also incorporate eye-catching subheadings and did much to popularise the use of interviews, in which he’d sometimes mingle his own opinions with those of his subjects. His lurid descriptions of life in London’s slums pressured the government into appointing a Royal Commission, which recommended the slums should be demolished and low-cost housing put up. Stead also campaigned against brothels and gambling dens and badgered the government into the disastrous decision to send the eccentric General Gordon to protect British interests in the Sudan. As Stead’s career progressed, he became more interested in and committed to the peace movement, covering the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 and advocating for a ‘United States of Europe’ and ‘High Court of Justice among the Nations’ (ideals that foreshadowed the United Nations and EU). Stead was a repeated nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Another, more controversial, obsession was spiritualism. Stead published a spiritualist magazine, Borderland, and maintained he was able to communicate with his deputy editor by means of telepathy and automatic writing. Stead also claimed to have acquired a spirit guide, one Julia A. Ames, an American temperance campaigner and journalist Stead met in 1890 shortly before her death. Though many Victorians lambasted spiritualism as superstitious nonsense, plenty more were fascinated by it and ouija boards and seances were fixtures of many polite drawing rooms. We had, then, the potent mix of a massively successful and influential journalist, the Victorian obsession with spiritualism and table tapping, and spooky rumours concerning Ancient Egyptian artefacts. (A craze for all things Ancient Egypt was another feature of the Victorian epoch.) This combustible concoction seems to have resulted in the birth of an explosive legend.

For any journalist at the time, the idea of a night-time seance being conducted in the British Museum’s Egyptian Rooms – with a table ringed by earnest figures surrounded by mummies and painted caskets and sombre gods – would have made excellent copy. And the unfortunate fact the museum turned down Murray and Stead’s request didn’t stop such articles being printed. The first appears to have been written by Stead himself and other excitable journalists soon picked up the story, with each likely adding in more sensationalist details in the hope of shifting newspapers. Their articles tended to merge the tormented soul of Amen-Ra’s mummy with the crockery smashing relic of the Victorian drawing room and to put this together with the idea of the aborted seance and other legends of Ancient Egyptian curses. The public lapped it up and an intriguing myth was soon in circulation.

We might wonder why Stead and Murray decided to propagate such a yarn. Both men were then in their forties, well-established and not in desperate need of funds. It seems that their profound spiritualist beliefs spurred them to make their claims about Amen-Ra’s curse. They may have hoped an outlandish story would capture the attention of those sceptical about the paranormal and lead them to an interest in spiritualist practices. If their aim was to publicise such beliefs, they succeeded as the story became widely popular, was retold frequently and resonated for years. Much of this popularity would, however, be aided by an unexpected incident, an incident that would involve W.T. Stead in the most tragic way imaginable. The myth of the Unlucky Mummy would become entwined with another story destined to assume the proportions of legend – the sinking of the Titanic.

Did the Unlucky Mummy Sink the Titanic?

One of the most fascinating claims about the Unlucky Mummy was that it was responsible for sinking the Titanic. Apparently, the British Museum had reached the point where it could no longer tolerate the spooky goings-on around the mummy and the artefact’s curse continually injuring or picking off its staff. The decision was made to try to offload the mummy and an American collector agreed to buy Amen-Ra. Her new owner packed her up and booked a passage for himself and his new possession on a ship to the States – a ship that just happened to be the infamous Titanic. This luxurious liner, the largest ship afloat at the time, hit an iceberg then went down in the early hours of 15th April 1912 on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. The tragedy resulted in 1,517 deaths, mainly due to insufficient lifeboats and confused and disorganised evacuation procedures.

The Titanic setting out from Southampton – did the Unlucky Mummy’s curse sink the ship?

So was this the end of Amen-Ra? Did she sink to the bottom of the North Atlantic’s cold waters, a place from which even her powerful magic would struggle to exert its malignant influence? Apparently not, according to some versions of the story. During the chaotic scramble for the lifeboats, amidst the cries of ‘women and children first’, the collector paid a bribe to have himself and his mummy stowed in one of these lifesaving crafts. After bobbing on the night-time waves, Amen-Ra – along with the surviving passengers – was rescued by a ship named the Carpathia and completed her journey to the New York.

Inevitably, however, the Unlucky Mummy was soon causing mayhem and misery at the home of its American owner so he decided to send her back to Britain. This, for some reason, was done via Canada, aboard a liner called the Empress of Ireland. After setting out from Quebec City, the Empress collided with a Norwegian coal ship on 29th May 1914 on the St Lawrence River. The Empress sank so quickly there was only time to launch seven of her 40 lifeboats and 840 people went down with the vessel to a watery doom. Amen-Ra, perhaps unsurprisingly, avoided this fate and ended up being placed on yet another liner, the Lusitania. Off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, on 7th May 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine. Almost 1,200 died and this time, it’s said, Amen-Ra sank with them.

A different version of the legend states Amen-Ra did indeed go down with the Titanic and that she’ll curse anybody who dares disturb her undersea tomb. Dark mutterings of this hex were supposedly heard among the crew on a failed 1980 expedition to locate the Titanic’s wreck.

But was the Unlucky Mummy really on the Titanic and did she finish up floating down to the ocean’s bottom? Records exist for the cargo that sailed with the Titanic, a fascinating list including feathers, hatters’ fur, auto parts, rabbit hair, elastics and early refrigeration gadgets, but absolutely no mummies, cursed or otherwise. The best evidence, however, that Amen-Ra didn’t end up in the chilly Atlantic depths is the fact you can still see her today, secure and dry, in a glass display case in the Egyptian Section of the British Museum. So how did this outlandish tale of the Unlucky Mummy on the Titanic come about?

Again, it appears W.T. Stead was to blame. Stead did travel on the Titanic – he was heading to the States because President Taft had invited him to address a peace conference at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Stead couldn’t resist entertaining the other passengers with the macabre tale of the Unlucky Mummy. He’s said to have begun his narrative during an 11-course dinner party on Friday 12th April and to have drawn it out until after midnight as his listeners sat rivetted.

On the night the iceberg struck, however, Stead had retired to bed early at 10.30 pm. Witnesses observed him helping women and children into the lifeboats and in an act ‘typical of his courage, generosity and humanity’ giving his life-jacket to another passenger. He was spotted calmly reading a book in the first-class smoking room as the Titanic went down, but a survivor, Phillip Mock, recalled him later clinging to a raft with the American business magnate John Jacob Astor IV. ‘Their feet became frozen,’ Mock said, ‘and they were compelled to release their hold. Both were drowned.’ Spookily, Stead had written an article in 1886 and a story in 1892 about the calamities that could result from ships having insufficient lifeboats and hitting icebergs. Stead’s tragedy was compounded by the fact it was widely believed he was due to be awarded 1912’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Luxury on the Titanic – inside the doomed ship’s Turkish baths

The notion the Unlucky Mummy was on the Titanic appears to have come about from an article published in the New York World a few days after the ship’s sinking. The article contained an interview with a survivor – one Frederic Kimber Seward – who mentioned Stead telling his creepy story. It seems that, over time, the accounts of Stead’s presence on the Titanic and the story he narrated morphed into a belief that Amen-Ra herself had travelled on the vessel. From there, it would be just a short logical hop to assume such a famous cursed artefact had caused the ship to sink.

The Unlucky Mummy’s Killing of an Over-Inquisitive Journalist and Amen-Ra’s Haunting of a London Underground Station

Even before the Titanic catastrophe, Amen-Ra had been getting quite a reputation. As mentioned above, much of this had to do with the embellishments of journalists and one of the most famous, and tragic, to have researched the Unlucky Mummy was Bertram Fletcher Robinson. A dashing up-and-coming editor and reporter, Robinson began with the intention of debunking the far-fetched stories that had grown up around Amen-Ra. The more he investigated, however, the more he became convinced the curse was real. In 1904, an article by Robinson – A Priestess of Death – appeared on the Daily Express front page. In it, Robinson ominously wrote, ‘It is certain that the Egyptians had powers which we in the 20th century may laugh at, yet can never understand.’

A few years later, Robinson was commissioned to write a longer article for Pearson’s Magazine, which had the same owner as the Express. As Robinson pried deeper into the secrets of Amen-Ra, his friends – aware of the disasters that had befallen those who’d dared meddle with the mummy – voiced concern. One such friend was Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, who Robinson had shown around his native West Country when Doyle was researching legends of phantom black dogs for his Hound of the Baskervilles. Doyle stated, ‘I warned Mr Robinson against concerning himself with the mummy at the British Museum. He persisted …’

In January 1907 – before he could finish his article – Robinson died at the age of just 36. Much of his research did, however, end up in an article Pearson’s eventually published in August 1909. In the same piece, Doyle set forth his ideas about Robinson’s death. ‘I told him he was tempting fate by pursuing his enquiries,’ Doyle darkly stated. ‘The immediate cause of death was typhoid fever, but that is the way in which the elementals (nature spirits) guarding the mummy might act.’

Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who held editorial positions with Vanity Fair, the Daily Express and Granta. Was he killed by the Unlucky Mummy’s curse?

The Pearson’s article might be the source of – or at least be responsible for amplifying – much of the mythology around the Unlucky Mummy. The article mentions the photographer capturing Amen-Ra’s glowering face and the loss of an arm while duck shooting on the Nile. The piece, however, has the owner of the mummy dying in Cairo while we know that Murray (assuming these people were one and the same) didn’t pass away till 1912. It’s possible that the owner of Pearson’s Magazine took advantage of Robinson’s untimely death and resurrected the old mummy myth to shift copies of his publication. Throwing in quotes from the famous Arthur Conan Doyle likely did no damage to the magazine’s bottom line. Doyle could be credulous. A Freemason and committed spiritualist, he was convinced the escapologist Harry Houdini had supernatural powers, despite Houdini continually denying he possessed such attributes. Doyle was also duped into believing fairies supposedly photographed in Cottingley, Yorkshire, were real and – along with W.T. Stead – wrongly claimed two stage magicians, Julius and Agnes Zancig, had psychic abilities.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1893 – a believer in the curse of the British Museum’s Unlucky Mummy

An even more bizarre story about the Unlucky Mummy claims she haunted a London Underground station. British Museum Station – a now abandoned Tube stop that served the institution of the same name – was reputedly connected to the museum by a secret passageway. The ghost of Amen-Ra would progress down this tunnel at night sporting a loincloth and magnificent headdress. She’d terrify passengers and staff with horrendous, unearthly shrieks, shrieks said to have resulted from the trauma of being ripped from her tomb and brought many miles to a strange land. Her anguished howls would reverberate down corridors and along tracks, seriously disturbing all who heard them.

Was British Museum Underground Station haunted by the Unlucky Mummy’s ghost?

Thanks to the opening of Holborn Station – less than 100 metres away – in 1906, British Museum Station became less and less frequented (unless it was the ghost frightening people off). It was announced that British Museum Station would close in 1933 and – shortly before it shut – two British newspapers offered a cash reward to anyone brave enough to spend a night alone there. Nobody took up the challenge.

Some claim the legends of the haunting of British Museum Station were sparked by a film, a comedy thriller called Bulldog Jack. In this movie, a secret tunnel leads from a London Underground station to the British Museum, where it emerges from an Egyptian sarcophagus. But – as the film didn’t premier until 1935 and British Museum Station closed in 1933 – it’s more likely that the legend influenced the film rather than vice-versa. Bulldog Jack, however, helped keep alive and spread Amen-Ra’s myth, especially as the film itself would contribute in a strange way to the Unlucky Mummy’s notoriety. On the night Bulldog Jack was released, two women are said to have disappeared while walking through the tunnels of Holborn Station. Screams and moans were heard around the time they vanished and scratch marks appeared on the walls. During the following days, there were sightings of the headdress-wearing priestess. Even today, some assert, if you stand on the platform at Holborn, you can occasionally hear shrieks and wails echoing down the tracks from British Museum Station. Amen-Ra remains one of the most famous of the London Underground’s many ghosts.

Was the 1935 film Bulldog Jack partly inspired by legends of the Unlucky Mummy’s curse?

There are, though, no police records or newspaper accounts of women going missing or being murdered near Holborn Station on the night Bulldog Jack premiered and the rumours of their disappearance were likely connected to the hype around the film. The tales of British Museum Station being haunted, however, probably came from old stories of the Unlucky Mummy and the media sensationalism linked to them. Such legends were likely bolstered by the fanfare surrounding the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 and the rumours of curses in the years that followed. Again, the press played a role. Lord Carnarvon, who funded the tomb’s excavation, signed a strict and exclusive agreement with The Times that limited the rights of other papers to feature the story. When Carnarvon died shortly after the tomb’s discovery – from an infection following a mosquito bite, a similar cause of death to that which probably befell Tutankhamun  – it seems the other papers took revenge, and no doubt boosted their sales, by gleefully speculating about a ‘curse’. The Daily Express quoted a mystic and novelist who claimed, ‘The most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb.’

How Much Truth Was There in the Outlandish Assertions about the Unlucky Mummy and What Were the Roots of Amen-Ra’s Strange Myth?

The Unlucky Mummy has been blamed for a lot of things – illnesses, injuries, deaths, abductions, the sinking of huge ships and the terrorising of passengers and staff on the London Tube. Legend even states that Sir Ernest Wallace Budge once muttered, ‘Never print what I saw in my lifetime, but the mummy case of Princess Amen-Ra caused the War.’ Apparently, the Unlucky Mummy was presented to the German Kaiser and the string of misfortunes that followed pushed the volatile emperor towards triggering World War I.

The truth would appear less dramatic. For a start, ‘Amen-Ra’ isn’t even a mummy. The artefact said to have caused all this trouble is merely the top half of a wooden coffin, dating from around 950 to 900 BC. The mummy it would have once shielded seems to have been left behind in Egypt. As for the knockings, apparitions, injuries and deaths supposedly visited on the British Museum after accepting Amen-Ra, these persistent rumours led Budge to issue a statement in 1934 that the museum had never possessed a mummy, coffin or cover that had been involved in any paranormal occurrences. He made it clear that the museum had never sold Amen-Ra’s coffin lid, that the coffin cover had never sailed on the Titanic and that it had not left the museum since arriving there. Budge admitted the artefact had been moved to the basement, but this was simply a precaution to protect the ornate lid – as well as many other treasures – during the First World War.

As early as 1923, Budge was trying to debunk the myths around the ‘Unlucky Mummy.’ In an interview with the New York Times, Budge related how the coffin lid of Amen-Ra had become confused with the crockery smashing mummy of the suburban drawing room and how the museum authorities had turned down Stead and Murray’s request to hold a seance. Budge described some of the hysteria that had grown up around the ‘mummy’, stating that people had sent letters from as far away as New Zealand and Algiers, containing money to buy flowers to be placed at Amen-Ra’s feet. The money had been put towards the general upkeep of the museum.

But was the coffin lid – despite its romance being somewhat lessened by the fact it no longer had a mummy to enclose – really part of the burial paraphernalia of a princess and priestess called Amen-Ra? Budge thought so, agreeing with Murray’s assessment by stating the cover’s owner would have been of ‘royal blood’. Early British Museum publications describe the artefact as having belonged to ‘a priestess of Amen-Ra’. Modern experts, however, disagree. The idea the casket sheltered the remains of a princess appears to have simply arisen from the high quality of the board. Though the coffin likely protected of a person of status, there’s no evidence its occupant was royal. There’s also no proof such a person was a priestess. Budge may have wrongly reached this conclusion because of a mention of King Amenhetep I on the coffin case, a benefactor of the priesthood of Amen-Ra at Thebes, where the lid probably came from. Moreover, there’s no indication the coffin’s tenant bore the name Amen-Ra herself.

Mummies and a frieze showing funeral rites in the British Museum’s First Egyptian Room

In addition to the embellishments of journalists and misunderstandings of early curators, it seems that a cast of colourful – and far from reliable – narrators have contributed outlandish additions to the Unlucky Mummy myth. The idea about the three disrespectful Egyptian servants dying appears to have come from a book called Witchcraft and Black Magic by Montague Summers (1880-1948). Summers was a highly eccentric character who claimed to be a Catholic priest, though there’s no evidence he was ever ordained. He believed in the literal existence of vampires and werewolves and could be seen swanning around the reading room of the British Museum – in a black cloak and buckled shoes – clutching a portfolio with ‘Vampires’ written on it in big blood-red letters.

Another colourful individual linked to the Unlucky Mummy myth was the folklorist and Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Murray put forward the notion that elaborate medieval secret societies practised witchcraft as an alternative religion to Christianity, a concept that – though now largely debunked – has had a strong influence on the Neo-Pagan movement. Murray, when almost 100 years old, confessed that she liked to entertain her students by talking about ‘Amen-Ra’s evil influence’ when taking them around the British Museum. Some were so frightened, they refused to enter the room containing the coffin case. Murray also claimed she’d invented certain myths about the mummy during an interview she didn’t take seriously. The ideas about the mummy sinking the Lusitania and Empress of Ireland appear to have come from her. Murray admitted she was astonished to hear such stories earnestly repeated as fact many years later.

There’s also the palmist Cheiro, who maintained that – after his dire predictions about Thomas Douglas Murray – Murray returned to see him with his empty right sleeve fastened across the front of his coat. During this meeting, Murray apparently related his Egyptian misadventures and subsequent struggles with the Unlucky Mummy. Cheiro was another unconventional figure who claimed to have – while still in his teenage years – travelled from his Irish home to India, where he learnt occult knowledge and the secrets of palmistry from the Brahmins. He’d acquire a high degree of fame, reading the hands of influential clients such as the Prince of Wales, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, W.T. Stead, and the prime ministers William Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. Other tales about the Unlucky Mummy seem to have originated from the ghost hunter Robert Thurston Hopkins, including the story about the photojournalist shooting himself.

And what About Sir Ernest Wallace Budge? Though he felt a professional duty to present himself as a man of science, reason and scepticism, he was also fascinated by the supernatural. Budge – the British Museum’s Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities for 30 years, a philologist and translator of the Egyptian Book of the Dead – was a member of the Ghost Club. According to Peter Underwood, author of Haunted London, ‘Budge, in private if not in public, certainly believed in Egyptian magic and the power of their dead.’ Budge died in 1934, shortly after making his statement dismissing the myths surrounding the Unlucky Mummy. Could ‘Amen-Ra’ have been avenging his belittling of her powers?

Pearson’s Magazine, featuring the curse of the Unlucky Mummy, in 1909

But we might also ask why tales of vengeful mummies and ancient curses so excited the Victorian and early 20th-century public. One reason was ‘Egyptomania’ – an enthusiasm for all things Ancient Egypt that began in Georgian times, springing from the colonial opening up of Egypt and advances in archaeology. Egyptian themes cropped up in operas and novels; tombs resembling miniature pyramids appeared in British churchyards; and Egyptian designs featured on furniture, jewellery and buildings. Egyptomania could lead to some far-fetched notions and outrageous goings-on. There were claims the Egyptians had understood the secrets of time travel – with a neo-Egyptian mausoleum in London’s Brompton Cemetery gaining a reputation as a ‘Victorian time machine’ – while the body of a Manchester heiress was even transformed by a less than honest doctor into an Egyptian-style mummy.

Yet could there be more behind this fascination for – and fear of – the legacy of Ancient Egypt? From 1798, when the French invaded Egypt under Napoleon, colonial powers – the French, the British, the Ottoman Turks and a dynasty descended from Albanian mercenaries originally employed by the Ottomans – vied for power and influence in the country. Britain launched an attack on Egypt in 1882, bombarding Alexandria for 10-and-a-half hours and causing a fire that destroyed much of the city. A successful land invasion followed and the British would remain in Egypt – in one way or another – until 1922.

Despite this victorious conquest, many in Britain felt disquiet about their country’s conduct. As would be the case in more modern times, people wondered whether a European nation should be getting involved in a Middle-Eastern country’s affairs, despite being told by their government the intervention was necessary to depose a tyrannical regime. Most of these doubters, however, didn’t express their unease openly through fear of seeming unpatriotic. Their anxieties and guilt perhaps manifested in another way – in a terror of cursed Egyptian artefacts taking revenge on Europeans who’d dared to disrespect them. An example of such an artefact is Cleopatra’s Needle, a huge obelisk that was shipped from Alexandria to London and now stands beside the Thames. The obelisk has accrued a rich folklore of hauntings, curses and occult powers.

All this combined with worries about how various types of science, and developing disciplines like history and archaeology, were upending old sacred ways of thinking. Advances in archaeology and comparative mythology – together with breakthroughs like Darwin’s laws of evolution – were making it harder to literally believe in the Bible and traditional Christianity, hence the fascination for seances and table rapping. (The growth of capitalist individualism also made it harder to accept that unique and precious individuals could one day cease to exist – thus the attempts to contact loved ones on ‘the other side’.) What better metaphor could there be for science overturning and outraging the ancient and sacred than archaeologists rifling Egyptian tombs and museum curators examining and labelling artefacts then placing them in the sterile environment of the glass case? And what better encapsulation of fears about where such sacrilege could lead than thrilling legends of age-old magical curses, legends ably amplified by a growing modern media?

In Guy Boothroyd’s 1899 novel Pharos the Egyptian, a character asks, ‘And pray by what right did your father rifle the dead man’s tomb? Perhaps you will show me his justification for carrying away the body from the country in which it had been laid to rest, and conveying it to England to be stared at in the light of curiosity.’

Such anxieties and fears have not departed even today. Visitors still report unsettling sensations when viewing the Unlucky Mummy’s coffin lid. In 2013, there was intense curiosity – and not a little unease – when an Egyptian statuette in the Manchester Museum began rotating in its case. (The rotating turned out to be caused by vibrations from passing traffic and visitors’ footsteps.) A May 2020 article in The Sun claimed that security guards in the British Museum had been witnessing strange phenomena like unexplained footsteps, glowing white orbs hovering above staircases, sightings of a ghostly female dwarf, alarms going off for no reason at midnight, and sudden plunges in temperature in the Egyptian galleries.

One guard – who’d worked at the museum for 29 years – said, ‘It was like walking into a freezer. My stomach turned over. The feel of the gallery was – you wanted to get out. I’m a great believer that, wherever you’re buried, you should stay there. A lot of the mummies there should be back in their graves.’

This article’s main image is courtesy of the British Museum (© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The post The Unlucky Mummy – Curse of the British Museum & Sinker of the Titanic? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Intrigued by how the tomb towers over the other grave markers, you might move closer and observe its Neo-Egyptian design. You might suspect this mausoleum has generated legends. Coming closer still, walking up the steps, you’d see the tomb’s huge bronze door bears a band of hieroglyphs. Scarab beetles are prominent – Ancient Egyptian symbols of the defiance of death and time and the embrace of the eternal.

You’d be right to think this mausoleum has become a node of London legend, a focus for urban myths, a nexus of the most incredible folklore. Some believe the tomb contains a working time machine or teleportation device, cobbled together by an eccentric Victorian inventor with the help of an Egyptologist who’d discovered scientific secrets while decoding hieroglyphs on the walls of tombs or carved into sarcophagi.

The tomb is the resting place of Hannah Courtoy – a wealthy London heiress obsessed with Ancient Egypt – and her two spinster daughters. The men responsible for the time machine the Courtoys allegedly share their mausoleum with also lie in Brompton Cemetery. Just a few metres from the Courtoy tomb is the grave of the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi, his headstone carved with a depiction of the jackal-headed god Anubis. And near the graves of Bonomi and Courtoy – in an unmarked plot – lies Samuel Alfred Warner, an idiosyncratic inventor whose ideas for ‘teleporting torpedoes’ so interested the British Navy they allowed him to blow up boats in the English Channel.

The hieroglyph-inscribed door of the Neo-Egyptian Courtoy tomb, Brompton Cemetery, London – note the scarab beetles, symbolising victory over death. (Photo: Peter Trimming)

But what were the connections between Hannah Courtoy, Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Warner? How did Hannah come by the immense wealth needed to build such a spectacular tomb? Could there be any truth in the legend that a time machine lurks in the Courtoy mausoleum? And might Hannah Courtoy, her daughters, Bonomi and Warner still be zipping through time and space today, having cheated aging and death and just occasionally returning to their Brompton Cemetery base?

Keep reading for tales of disagreeable French wigmakers, knife-armed prostitutes, bitterly contested wills, murders undertaken to protect national security, and secret teleportation passages to other London Victorian graveyards and even Paris cemeteries.

Hannah Courtoy’s Tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery is one of London’s so-called Magnificent Seven – the ring of large Victorian graveyards built in the countryside on the then-outskirts of the capital to relieve pressure on the rapidly growing city’s gruesomely overcrowded churchyards and burial grounds. Kensal Green Cemetery opened in 1833 while the highly gothic West Norwood Cemetery was accepting burials by 1837. Highgate Cemetery opened in 1839; Abney Park, Nunhead and Brompton Cemeteries were in business by 1840; and Tower Hamlets Cemetery opened in 1841.

Victorian angels in Brompton Cemetery, London. (Photo: Edwardx)

These graveyards – with typical Victorian enthusiasm – were grandly laid out, with vast gates, long tree-shaded avenues, landscaped grounds and elaborate networks of catacombs. Much of the design drew inspiration from ancient civilisations and earlier epochs. Highgate Cemetery boasts an imposing Egyptian-style gate leading into the Egyptian Avenue while the padlocked doors to Brompton Cemetery’s extensive catacombs are emblazoned with the age-old occult symbol of snakes curling around staffs. In both Brompton and Highgate, urns are kept in buildings known as Columbariums, a custom which draws from Roman mortuary practices. Brompton was planned in the form of an enormous outdoor cathedral, in the style of Rome’s St Peter’s Square and Basilica, with its ‘nave’ running from Old Brompton Road towards the central colonnade and chapel. The cemetery was luxuriantly planted with shrubs and trees. Ornate graves and mausoleums – ranging from pseudo-gothic chapels and Arts-and-Crafts faux-medieval reliquaries to Egyptian-style obelisks (symbolic of the sun god Ra) – have added to Brompton Cemetery’s gloomy yet appealing grandeur.

The Main Avenue in Brompton Cemetery, looking towards the chapel. Note the Neo-Egyptian obelisks. (Photo: Russell Trebor)

Those buried at Brompton include the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, John Keats’s muse Fanny Brawne, the founder of the Cunard shipping line Samuel Cunard, and the murdered Victorian actor William Terriss, whose ghost apparently haunts Covent Garden London Underground Station. Beatrix Potter would stroll the cemetery and pick out names from gravestones for her characters – with Peter Rabbett and Mr Nutkins among those chosen. But – out of all the broken pillars and shrouded urns and praying angels and other Victorian memento mori and funerary art – it’s the Courtoy mausoleum that stands out most.

Completed in 1854, the Courtoy tomb is twenty feet tall and made from polished granite. Its bronze door is ornately inscribed with what appear to be Hannah’s initials, H.C. Egyptian hieroglyphs decorate one of its steps and the tops of its walls, as well as a rectangular band on the door. The mausoleum’s crowned with a structure resembling a stepped pyramid and attractive Egyptian designs adorn its cornices. One thing that’s perhaps drawn the attention of psychogeographers and occultists is the fact the tomb stands on its own kind of island, its own circle of ground in the middle of a crossroads. Crossroads in folklore are liminal places, with the intersection of two roads suggestive of a spot where different states or dimensions might meet – life and death, this world and the otherworld, perhaps even different eras. Crossroads were for a long time sites of gibbets and gallows. Suicides were buried at these junctions and magical rituals conducted. Crossroads were even viewed as places where – as in the case of the blues musician Robert Johnson – you could approach the Devil to ask a favour.

The Courtoy Mausoleum – or Victorian time machine – in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Peter Trimming)

Those with a fondness for the esoteric have also pointed out that – in addition to the hieroglyphs – the tomb bears strange decorations. There are wheel-like motifs at the door’s bottom, which some claim are symbols for – or components of – the time machine. High on the walls, on all four sides of the tomb, are large circular holes. Each of these contain what appears to be a glass orb and each has eight smaller holes in a ring around it. Some say these patterns resemble clocks or dials; others assert the glass spheres are crystals that power the time machine; yet more enthusiasts maintain the holes suck in the sun’s energy or are connected in some way to Bonomi’s explorations of the occult. Many indeed claim Bonomi designed the Courtoy tomb.

Wheel motifs on Brompton Cemetery’s Courtoy tomb – are they components of a time machine? (From a photo by Peter Trimming) 

A mausoleum like this must have cost a huge amount of money and we must ask where Hannah got it from, especially as she started life at a humble level, working as a servant and barmaid. Also, we might wonder exactly how Bonomi and Warner are said to have collaborated with regards to the strange tomb and the weird machine it supposedly contains. Read on and we’ll try to find out.

The Unusual Life and Strange Egyptian Obsessions of Hannah Courtoy

Hannah Courtoy was born Hannah Peters, most sources say in 1784. She left home young, escaping an abusive father, and worked as a housekeeper and in taverns. In 1800, a friend introduced her to John Courtoy, a 70-year-old man in bad health. Of French descent and originally a wigmaker, Courtoy had made an enormous fortune from lending money. He appointed Hannah his housekeeper and a close relationship soon developed between the two. The sources are unclear about what Courtoy’s malady was, but some hint it had been caused by a psychological trauma triggered by a prostitute slashing at him with a knife.

Whatever effect this incident had on Courtoy’s physical health, it appears – at least – to have had a lasting mental impact, making him antisocial and taciturn. He warmed to his young housekeeper, however, and – within a year of entering his employment – Hannah gave birth to the first of what would be three daughters. Hannah always claimed the daughters were John Courtoy’s and she took his name though they never married. Some, however, suspecting Hannah of gold-digging, believed the friend who’d introduced her to Courtoy – one Francis Grosso – had fathered the girls.

Despite managing to get closer to the grumpy Courtoy than anyone else, Hannah still struggled with living with a man who could be profoundly unpleasant. She appears to have escaped into the fascinating world of Ancient Egyptian civilisation and myth, topics which obsessed many Georgians and Victorians. The colonial opening up of Egypt by the British and French and advances in archaeology fuelled these fixations. In 1877-8, the almost-3,500-year-old obelisk Cleopatra’s Needle was shipped to London stand next to the Thames. Plundered objects filled the British Museum while newspapers were full of the exploits of archaeologists and – sometimes – the curses placed upon them by the angry Pharaohs whose tombs they broke into. One particularly outlandish story had a mummy’s screaming ghost haunting not only the British Museum, but also a nearby London Underground Station the spook accessed via a secret tunnel. Another strange episode had an English doctor attempting mummification himself, turning a Manchester heiress into a mummy that ended up exhibited in one of that city’s museums. Egyptian motifs appeared on products as diverse as jewellery and furniture, Egyptian themes invaded operas and novels, and miniature pyramids even popped up in British graveyards to hold the remains of eccentric squires and wealthy professional men. Hannah – like so many of her compatriots – appears to have become more and more engrossed with the mystical society that once flourished on the banks of the Nile.

The gates to the catacombs of Brompton Cemetery, London, decorated with the occult emblem of snakes curling around staffs. Note also the memento mori symbols of downward-facing torches and a winged hourglass. (Photo: Marathon)

As John Courtoy aged and his health further declined, Hannah seems to have gained more influence over him. In 1810, Courtoy made a will leaving most of his fortune to an ex-wife named Mary Anne Woolley and their five children. This will was amended in 1814 to award Hannah the largest share of Courtoy’s assets. When Courtoy died in 1818, both Woolley and Courtoy’s French relatives challenged the amended will, claiming Courtoy had developed dementia and hadn’t been completely in his senses when he’d altered the document. Court battles dragged on until 1827, but by this date Hannah and her daughters had secured most of Courtoy’s wealth.

Hannah, boosted by her inheritance, lived a lavish life, a life that meant she could indulge even more in her ‘Egyptomania’. Indeed, her wealth and status gave her access to some of those most knowledgeable about Ancient Egypt. Diaries kept by a Courtoy servant, Maureen Sayers, show a regular visitor to the house was the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi. Hannah and Bonomi soon struck up a friendship and spent hours discussing Egyptian hieroglyphs, religion, magic and astrology. All this led Hannah to conclude the Egyptians had possessed a deep understanding of the cosmos and its workings. One subject Hannah and Bonomi may have dwelled on was time travel. The Victorians frequently speculated that the Ancient Egyptians had knowledge of this art. H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, for instance, features the motif of the Sphinx. During their lengthy chats about Egyptian lore, the idea seems to have been raised of Hannah funding one of Bonomi’s expeditions. (Cynics might say this could explain the amount of time Bonomi dedicated to his female disciple). The two also arranged for the construction of a 175-foot monument to the Duke of Wellington, a structure they made sure resembled an Egyptian obelisk.

Hannah Courtoy’s friendship with Bonomi continued as the years passed. Many claim Hannah chose him to design her tomb and its Neo-Egyptian style certainly pays homage to their obsessions. The elaborate mausoleum was, however, not ready when Hannah passed away on 26th January 1849 at 14 Wilton Crescent, Belgravia, one of London’s most exclusive addresses. It would be half-a-decade before Hannah’s body could be moved into its final – though opulent – abode. Two of Hannah’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth – neither of whom married, reputedly because they didn’t want men chasing their money – joined her in the mausoleum, in 1876 and 1895 respectively. Hannah’s other daughter Susannah – who married the barrister Septimus Holmes Godson – is buried elsewhere in Brompton Cemetery.

The Courtoy tomb – rumoured to be a Victorian time machine – in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Matt Brown)

Mysteriously, no plans of the Courtoy tomb can be found in Brompton Cemetery’s archives: some claim it’s the only tomb for which plans are unavailable. But couldn’t the tomb just be opened so we can know what’s inside? The mausoleum’s key is missing and – as a large key of archaic design would have to be specially made to unlock the tomb – the door cannot simply be opened by a locksmith. Perhaps tellingly, the cemetery authorities seem reluctant to have such a key created. But did Bonomi really design Hannah’s mausoleum? And could the Courtoy tomb really contain a Victorian-Egyptian time machine or teleportation device? To answer such questions, we’ll need to know a little more about the lives of Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Alfred Warner.

Joseph Bonomi the Younger – Did He Deduce the Secrets of Time Travel during His Egyptian Research?

Joseph Bonomi the Younger was born in London in 1796. His father – the unsurprisingly named – Joseph Bonomi the Elder was an Italian immigrant, who grew famous for his skill as an architect and draughtsman and as a designer of country houses. An older brother, Ignatius Bonomi, was also a noted architect.

Joseph the Younger – who would become well-known as a sculptor, artist, Egyptologist and museum curator – began his artistic journey by studying at the Royal Academy. In 1822, he travelled to Rome – his father’s native city – to continue his education there, but after several months found himself in debt. He was rescued by the Scottish antiquarian and Egyptologist Robert Hay, who offered him a modestly paid commission to join an expedition to Egypt. Thus began a lifelong fascination for Bonomi.

Portrait of the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi the Younger, by Matilda Sharpe (1868) – did he discover the secrets of time travel?

In Egypt, he sketched antiquities and temple interiors, even inventing a kind of drawing-frame-cum-viewfinder to record such ancient remains more accurately. Bonomi also produced plaster casts of the reliefs of the famous temples of Kalabsha. After two years with Hay, Bonomi – resentful at his low salary – fell out with him. He stayed in Egypt, however, living in Cairo, where he illustrated the pioneering Egyptologist James Burton’s Excerpta hieroglyphica. His finances restored by such work, Bonomi re-joined Hay in 1832 and – after a couple more years in Egypt – undertook tours of Syria and Palestine. In 1839, he contributed illustrations to Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians by Sir John Gardiner Wilkinson, a man described as ‘the father of British Egyptology’.

Upon his return to England, Bonomi followed his family tradition by branching out into architecture. He co-designed the entrance to Abney Park Cemetery, ensuring the gateway was built in an Egyptian style, complete with hieroglyphs signifying the graveyard was ‘the Abode of the Mortal Part of Man’. Bonomi masterminded the famous Egyptian facade for the Temple Works flax mill in Leeds, which opened in 1841, and in 1850 he designed an ‘Egyptian spring’ at Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire, for the mathematician, antiquarian and numismatist Dr John Lee. Between 1842 and 1844, he even fitted in another tour of Egypt, this time as part of a Prussian expedition.

Abney Park Cemetery’s Neo-Egyptian gateway, designed by Joseph Bonomi the Younger. (Photo: Tarquin Binary)

Bonomi kept up his practice of being an illustrator and was considered one of the most skilled reproducers of hieroglyphs in Britain. He  published books on Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia illustrated with his own drawings and wrote well-received works on obelisks and other Egyptian monuments. He also compiled and illustrated many Egyptian collections, including that of the Egyptologist Samuel Birch, who produced a hieroglyphical grammar and dictionary and translated The Book of the Dead. Along with the architect Owen Jones, Bonomi set up the Egyptian Court in the spectacular Crystal Palace when – after it had housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 – it was rebuilt in Sydenham, South London, in 1854. Bonomi also helped arrange the Egyptian exhibits in the British Museum and became the curator of the Sir John Soames Museum in 1861. Joseph Bonomi the Younger died in March 1878 and was laid to rest in Brompton Cemetery.

The Neo-Egyptian Facade of Temple Works flax mill in Leeds, designed by Joseph Bonomi the Younger. (Photo: Sarah Grice)

So Joseph Bonomi had a profound understanding of hieroglyphs and Ancient Egyptian culture and had worked closely with many of Britain’s leading scholars of Egyptology. He’d also proved himself as a architect of Neo-Egyptian buildings. It’s therefore entirely possible that Hannah Courtoy would have asked him to design her mausoleum and that – as he was close to her – Bonomi would have accepted the job. While we don’t know if this is what took place, those who argue there’s a connection between Bonomi and the Courtoy tomb point to an intriguing detail on Bonomi’s own headstone.

Bonomi’s tombstone is fairly modest, certainly in comparison to the lavish Courtoy mausoleum. At its top are the Christian symbols of a cross and the Greek letters alpha and omega, but further down things get a lot more Egyptian. Towards the stone’s foot is an engraving of the Egyptian deity Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, mummification, embalming, tombs, cemeteries and the afterlife. There are two intriguing things about the depiction of the deity. One is that the god is facing in the direction of the Courtoy tomb. The other is that Anubis is positioned on some sort of structure or plinth. Some have remarked on this edifice’s similarity to the Courtoy mausoleum. While the dimensions of Anubis’s plinth don’t exactly match the trapezoid shape of the Courtoy tomb, you have to admit – if you allow just a little imagination to colour your thinking – that the resemblance is curious to say the least.

Joseph Bonomi’s gravestone in Brompton Cemetery – note the depiction of the Egyptian god Anubis: is he looking towards the Courtoy tomb? (Photo: Edward Hands)

But what of the more outlandish notion that Bonomi – while deciphering hieroglyphs – stumbled upon the secrets of time travel and helped build a time machine that he hid in the tomb? And if he did make such a bizarre discovery, how might Bonomi have transformed this esoteric knowledge into a practical invention? Bonomi – despite his many talents, deep learning and artistic skill – wouldn’t have had the technical know-how to create such a cutting-edge contraption. In fact, no one in Victorian England would have unless they’d managed to crack some of the most difficult scientific puzzles facing humanity and made a technological leap centuries ahead of their time. One name has been proposed for a man who might just have accomplished such things – Samuel Alfred Warner.

Did Samuel Alfred Warner Invent Brompton Cemetery’s Time Machine?

Samuel Alfred Warner was born in 1793 in Heathfield, East Sussex. His father, William, a carpenter, was rumoured to have a sideline in smuggling. Little is known of Samuel’s early life, but by 1819 he appears to have been working with a London chemist on an explosive. For some time, he served King Pedro I of Brazil and on returning to England managed to capture the interest of King William IV with claims he’d invented secret weapons.

From around 1830, Warner maintained he’d produced two startling innovations. One was what he termed an ‘invisible shell’, a kind of high explosive underwater mine or torpedo ‘no bigger than a duck’s egg’. The other he called the ‘long range’, which, it appears, was a balloon that dropped the ‘invisible shells’ automatically. Warner seems to have attempted an unsuccessful trial of these weapons in collaboration with Charles Green, a pioneering hot air balloonist.

Undeterred, Warner pressed on, conducting a demonstration on an Essex lake that was watched by the prime minister Sir Robert Peel – a demonstration that saw a boat blown up. The government were intrigued and committees were appointed to look into Warner’s inventions. The problem was that, when questioned by the committees, Warner refused to reveal any details of his gizmos until he’d been assured of a payment of £200,000 for each, a staggering sum for the time. Warner – seen by many as a charlatan today – further complicated matters by claiming that during the Napoleonic Wars he’d served under his father on a ship chartered by the British government for espionage purposes and that he’d destroyed two enemy vessels using his inventions. He provided no proof for this narrative, which was marred by anachronisms.

Nevertheless, a further trial of Warner’s devices was arranged, in the English Channel off Brighton in 1844. A substantial crowd watched another ship being destroyed, but officials deemed they couldn’t ascertain what exactly had caused this. Sceptics suspected Warner had attached explosives to an already weakened vessel before the demonstration began. The establishment, however, didn’t lose faith in Warner’s gadgets and in 1852 the House of Lords appointed another committee to examine his claims. After this committee had existed for only one week, though, the Duke of Wellington decided that – as the matter was of military importance – the Ordinance Department should investigate it. The Ordinance Department, however, doesn’t appear to have followed through with any inquiry and official enthusiasm for Warner’s ideas lapsed.

In the early days of December 1853, Warner died in unclear circumstances, leaving a widow and seven children. The fact that he was buried in an unmarked grave indicates he made little – if any – money from his supposedly revolutionary inventions.

So what could connect this offbeat inventor with Joseph Bonomi and Hannah Courtoy and what might link him to the Courtoy tomb and the time machine it allegedly contains? Some say Warner knew or was friends with Bonomi or that for a time the pair were business partners. There’s also the mystery of what exactly Warner’s weapons were capable of. It’s claimed that – as the remote detonation of a bomb would have been impossible with the technology of the era – Warner’s torpedo could have only worked via some kind of teleportation or time slip. This – it’s asserted – Warner achieved thanks to secret knowledge gleaned from hieroglyphs by his friend Bonomi. Funded by Hannah’s fortune, the duo then developed their ideas and constructed a time machine, which they hid in Brompton Cemetery’s Courtoy tomb.

Hannah Courtoy’s Neo-Egyptian tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery – does it conceal a Victorian time machine? (Photo: Edwardx)

Mythmakers have also seized on the date and unexplained manner of Warner’s death. He died not long after official interest in his theories ended. Might the government have decided his weapons were simply too dangerous to be unleashed on the world or feared them falling under the control of an enemy nation? Could the powers-that-be have therefore murdered Warner to prevent him offering his services to another state or inflicting mass carnage on the planet? Some have even suggested it was Bonomi who bumped Warner off, perhaps out of jealousy or to keep the knowledge of their remarkable invention secret. Others say it isn’t Warner who lies in the unmarked grave – the body in there’s just a decoy and Warner’s actually alive and traversing the aeons in his contraption.

Questions, those fond of a good urban legend assert, do remain. Warner was buried around the time the Courtoy tomb was completed. And Bonomi’s Egyptian-themed headstone was set up not long before Warner’s death. Though Bonomi wouldn’t pass on till many years later, the stone was erected to mark the resting place of four of his children who died of whooping cough in 1852. Might there be more than coincidence here? And why did Hannah’s tomb take so long to finish if there wasn’t some project of great scientific complexity going on? Let’s plunge deeper into this myth and see if we can find any answers to its riddles.

A Teleportation Chamber and the Making of a Surprisingly Modern Myth

It’s been claimed the Courtoy tomb isn’t actually a time machine at all, but rather a teleportation device. This idea was floated most famously in a 2011 blogpost by the London musician Stephen Coates, otherwise known as the Clerkenwell Kid. Coates maintains that teleportation passageways were created to connect the Courtoy mausoleum to tombs with similar designs in London’s other great Victorian graveyards. In fact, all the Magnificent Seven cemeteries were graced with these Neo-Egyptian teleportation buildings. On his blog, Coates provides photos of tombs in Highgate and Kensal Green with resemblances to the Courtoy mausoleum. Another, at Abney Park, is rumoured to have been designed by Bonomi. Coates admits, however, that the ‘teleportation chambers’ in the other cemeteries ‘appear to have entirely vanished’.

A Neo-Egyptian tomb in Kensal Green Cemetery, London – one of Coates’s alleged teleportation chambers. (Photo: Philafrenzy)

The purpose, Coates claims, of all this teleportation malarkey was to create ‘a transportation grid around London to reduce the time taken to travel the large distances of the vast congested metropolis.’ So, then, a kind of precursor to the London Underground was planned using a hieroglyph-derived method of occult propulsion rather than steam or electricity. Some have taken Coates’s theories further, claiming the metaphysical metro even connects to an Egyptian mausoleum in a Paris graveyard – though it’s uncertain whether this Victorian Eurostar links up with Père Lachaise Cemetery or the burial ground in Montmartre. As for Samuel Alfred Warner’s mysterious demise, Coates feels he may have became ‘lost while teleporting’.

As entertaining as Coates’s blogpost is, I suspect that much of the myth of Brompton Cemetery’s ‘time machine’ grew up from articles like it. An influential article seems to have been one published by the international news agency Reuters on 29th October 1998. This piece, written by Helen Smith and likely with an eye on the upcoming festival of Halloween, features quotes from a little-known author called Howard Webster. Webster states that he began researching the Courtoy tomb after being struck by it while visiting Brompton Cemetery for an unrelated project. The article tells us Webster ‘now believes the twenty-foot-tall building was a time machine built by a maverick Victorian genius, Samuel Warner.’ Webster also makes the now familiar claims that Warner was murdered by the government, that he collaborated with Bonomi and that Hannah Courtoy financed their endeavours. In addition, Webster mentions the engraving of Anubis on Bonomi’s headstone, emphasising that the god is looking towards the mausoleum and that the direction the deity faces also ‘suggests in Egyptian mythology a soul lost out of time.’

Smith’s article also quotes a ‘spokesman at Brompton Cemetery’ called James Mackay, who has a somewhat sober take on Webster’s claims. While Mackay admits it’s possible that ‘some of the papyri they (archaeologists at the time) were decoding dealt with time travel’, he thinks that Warner was ‘an ingenious hoaxer who used tricks to blow up ships for his weapons demonstrations and managed to dupe the Courtoy spinsters into believing he could build them a time machine.’ Mackay does, however, acknowledge that if Warner did believe he was constructing such a device ‘his choice of a cemetery was a shrewd and appropriate one … it was one of the few places where one could work unobserved and where even the most eccentric structures could be explained away.’ Mackay points out that ‘a cemetery where the wealthy and famous are buried is also a location that one could say with great certainty is unlikely to be the subject of redevelopment over time.’ Just like the Egyptian tombs Bonomi imitated, these ‘structures could remain intact over centuries’.

A Victorian gothic mausoleum in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Edwardx)

Adding to the mystery, the Reuters article claims ‘there is almost no trace of the Courtoy spinsters. They left no will or other record of their existence, even though the size and opulence of their tomb suggests they were wealthy and influential.’ The article also states the Courtoy mausoleum is the only one in Brompton Cemetery for which no plans can be found, with Mackay remarking ‘the biggest mystery is that you couldn’t build anything in the cemetery without plans and there are no plans’. In addition, Smith’s piece stresses that ‘there is no surviving key’ and that the tomb’s ‘huge bronze door … has not been opened for more than 120 years.’ It also has Webster raising the possibility that ‘Warner’s is not the body in the unmarked grave … I like to believe … he is still alive and travelling through time in his machine.’

I’d suggest this article is the genesis of Brompton Cemetery’s time machine myth. Most of the legend’s central ideas seem to have been arrived at by Webster in his ‘research’. Smith does feature the ‘cemetery spokesman’ Mackay, but it’s not clear from the article if he’s just responding to Webster’s notions or referencing more established folklore. One point he does make, however, is wrong – the Courtoy tomb isn’t the only one in Brompton Cemetery missing its plans. Blueprints are unobtainable for a number of major mausoleums. Likewise, it isn’t in any way exceptional for the keys of old tombs to be lost. The article’s assertion that the Courtoy’s left no will is also incorrect – Hannah Courtoy’s will can be found in the National Archives and is even available online. And I haven’t been able to find any trace of the writer Howard Webster anywhere else despite a thorough trawl through the internet. It’s my suspicion that Webster, an obscure author – having seen the unusual tomb and discovered that a famous Egyptologist and erratic inventor were buried nearby – concocted most of the, admittedly impressive, legend during the 1990s. Popularised by Smith’s widely read article, the myth become a piece of accepted London folklore and others over the years embellished it.

Many of these embellishments, while quaintly fascinating, can also be discounted. The idea that the circular motifs carved into the door’s bottom are components of the time machine is highly questionable. Such indentations are common in Victorian mausoleums – a means of allowing any foul vapours to escape the tomb, thereby preventing gases building up to dangerous levels. As for the ‘crystals’ and ‘dials’ set in the stone near the top, the glass could simply be decoration and the smaller holes also openings through which the fumes of decomposition could disperse.

The ‘missing key’ may have been lost as late as 1980 – some suggest during a visit by Hannah’s descendants though it’s unclear whether they went inside the tomb. The reluctance of the cemetery to replace it is probably down to the fact that having such an implement forged by an expert artisan would be quite an expense, especially for a graveyard full of ancient and precious monuments that must be maintained. The exterior of the Courtoy Mausoleum was, however, repaired in 2009 as frost-cracked chunks of granite had started dropping off the sides.

The Arts-and-Crafts tomb of Frederick Richards Leyland, in the style of a medieval reliquary, Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Edwardx)

Fresh attention was focused on the Courtoy tomb and its legend when the mausoleum featured on the cover of a 2003 album by the Scottish Musician Drew Mulholland, who records as Mount Vernon Astral Temple. The cover of the album – entitled Musick that Destroys Itself  – shows an spooky vortex radiating from the tomb’s entrance. Stephen Coates’s popular blogpost then added more to the myth. Interestingly, in his post, Coates suggests the Courtoy tomb inspired Dr Who’s Tardis – an intriguing idea for which there’s, unfortunately, no proof. For anyone, however, looking at the tomb and knowing its legends, the realisation it resembles some stone-walled Tardis must inevitably spring to mind. As for his concept of the seven Victorian-Egyptian teleportation chambers, Coates – while admitting he ‘came up with the whole teleportation system as the background to a short story’ – prefers to characterise his idea as an ‘alternative theory based on historical fact’. Maybe there’s just something about creepy Victorian graveyards and their tendency to generate weird folklore – it’s been rumoured, for instance, that vampires have lurked in both Highgate Cemetery and Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis.

Enthusiasm for Brompton Cemetery’s myth shows no sign of abating. For those with an inclination towards the gothic, the cemetery runs moonlight tours, which inevitably stop at the tomb-cum-time-machine. Storytelling sessions have also been organised at the graveyard, by Coates and the storyteller Vanessa Woolf. The money raised will go towards the funding of a key by which the mausoleum could be opened as well as contributing to renovation efforts in the cemetery. The first event took place in 2015 and, Woolf says, ‘We were absolutely overwhelmed with bookings.’

‘There’s a huge interest in the story in London,’ Woolf told the website Mental Floss. ‘This is a story rooted in the secret, in the occult, but no one is quite sure what actually happened.’

But what if a new key could be fabricated? Woolf said, ‘It’s much nicer in a way not having it. It’s all really in the minds of the audience. It’s a slab of rock. The real magic is in their minds.’

Coates, while eager to get a look inside the tomb, still feels that ‘opening it may not establish it’s not a time machine. It may just deepen the mystery.’ He indeed suspects – even if the tomb’s interior proves to be that of an ordinary mausoleum – the really interesting stuff might be concealed in a secret subterranean chamber. Getting access to that would be the next step.

(This article’s main image – of the Neo-Egyptian Courtoy tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery – is courtesy of Edwardx.)

The post Brompton Cemetery’s Time Machine – a Victorian Contraption Hidden in a London Tomb? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Then you trudge around the corner of the church building, look up, gasp, blink, look again. Your eyes are not tricking you – in front of you, there really does stand a 25-foot (7.6-metre) pyramid. It rises from the green land, against a background of bare trees; sheep bumble around it; moss patches its stones; its point tears at the mist, but – in this most English of scenes – it’s there: a pyramid, a miniaturisation of Ancient Egypt seemingly transported from the shores of the Nile and plonked down in a British churchyard.

And it’s not the only one. A number of such pyramid mausoleums are scattered across England – brooding in dark stone next to modest churches, crowning green hilltops or rising incongruously from the lush grass of aristocratic estates.

These pyramid tombs are magnets for bizarre legends – tales tell of glass strewn over their floors to repel the Devil, of occupants seated with bottles of wine to await the Resurrection. There are stories of the dead clutching playing cards in the hope of outwitting demons, of attempts to stop people dancing on ex-lover’s graves, of glimpses of tragic ghosts and of desperate schemes to keep family fortunes intact.

England’s pyramid tombs were the product of ‘Egyptomania’ – the passion for all things Ancient Egypt that gripped Europe and North America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Freemasons became fascinated with the Pyramids’ ‘sacred geometry’ and the esoteric secrets supposedly hidden in their designs. Neo-Egyptian buildings sprouted on European streets; Egyptian themes invaded literature, opera and art; and Egyptian motifs appeared on products as diverse as furniture, jewellery and dinner services.

And, as so much of Ancient Egyptian culture revolved around death, it’s not surprising that pyramid tombs began popping up in English churchyards and beyond. Though England boasts quite a range of wonderful pointy-topped mausoleums, I’ve attempted to compile a list of the ten best. So let’s go for a quick tour and see what we can make of England’s strange pyramid tombs.

Number 1: Mad Jack Fuller’s Pyramid in Brightling Churchyard, Sussex

The pyramid tomb described above is England’s most famous. It was erected to house the body of one ‘Mad Jack Fuller’ – the squire of the hamlet of Brightling, Sussex. The pyramid stands, dark and moody, in the corner of Brightling’s St Thomas a Beckett Churchyard, dominating the gravestones and even seeming to challenge the primacy of the church itself.

Mad Jack Fuller’s pyramid tomb in Brightling Churchyard, Sussex, England. (Photo: Plumbago)

Born in 1757, the famous eccentric John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller served as a Member of Parliament for Southampton and Sussex. The Fuller family had made their fortune from iron foundries and Jack’s wealth was further boosted when he inherited his uncle’s Sussex estates and Jamaican slave plantations in 1777 at the age of just 20. Fantastically fat and a well-known drunk, Fuller was ejected from Parliament in 1810 by the Serjeant-at-arms after a passionate and alcohol-fuelled denunciation of the government. This incident resulted in public disgrace, effectively ended his political career and even led to Jack being threatened with imprisonment in the Tower of London.

Fuller used his substantial wealth to support scientific developments – including mentoring Michael Faraday, who conducted pioneering studies into electricity and magnetism. Jack also bought and commissioned a number of paintings from J.M.W Turner. But Mad Jack Fuller’s urge to be remembered went beyond sponsoring science and art – like the Egyptians, he wished to bequeath a legacy in stone. He constructed a number of follies on his estates – such as an obelisk, a mock Greek temple and a cone-shaped structure rumoured to have been built to win a bet – in addition to his pyramid mausoleum.

As the pharaohs had, Jack ordered that work should begin on his pyramid while he was still very much alive. The tomb was built between 1810 and 11, many years before his death in 1834. According to legend, Mad Jack Fuller was interred at the centre of his pyramid dressed for dinner, seated on an iron chair and wearing a top hat. On a table in front of him were a bottle of port and roast chicken, so that when the trumpet blast of the Resurrection came he wouldn’t be hungry or suffer thirst. Apparently, Fuller ordered that bits of glass should be scattered over the tomb’s floor – to prick the Devil’s cloven hooves and thereby discourage him from coming to claim Mad Jack’s soul.

Another story says that to get permission for his pyramid mausoleum – which takes up a quarter of the churchyard – Jack had to make serious efforts to persuade the vicar. Local folklore claims Jack even promised to move his pub – the Green Man – from opposite the church, as the tavern’s rowdiness was distressing for the devout. The pub was relocated to a converted barn and renamed The Fuller’s Arms.

When restoration work on the pyramid was done in 1982, the stories about Jack’s interment were found to be false. Mad Jack Fuller was buried rather prosaically beneath the floor of his mausoleum and there were no signs of roast chickens, bottles of port or broken glass. The tale about Jack having to move his pub is also untrue. The parish register states that – to be allowed to build his fantastical monument – Mad Jack Fuller was merely required to erect a new churchyard wall, along with an iron gate and two pillars.

Number Two: Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Pyramid in St Anne’s Churchyard, Limehouse, London

Nicholas Hawksmoor’s pyramid in St Anne’s Churchyard, Limehouse, London. (Photo: Jim Osley)

A much smaller – but possibly more curious – pyramid stands in the churchyard of St Anne’s, Limehouse. Green and mossy, this slim structure reaches a height of 9 feet (2.74 metres) and bears the strange inscription ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’ in English and Hebrew.

No one knows the exact purpose of the pyramid. Some suggest it’s a grave marker; others suspect it was intended to decorate the church’s tower but – being surplus to the builders’ needs – was left in the churchyard. The architect of St Anne’s was Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736). Known as ‘the Devil’s Architect’, Hawksmoor was a noted Freemason fond of peppering his buildings with ‘pagan’ symbols like obelisks and pyramids.

Perhaps only Hawksmoor knows why the pyramid is there and what its mysterious inscription refers to, though King Solomon – as builder of the Great Temple in Jerusalem – is revered by Freemasons. Hawksmoor apparently made plans for a full reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple, a monument which – like the Pyramids – was thought to express the universe’s secrets within its geometry. Another of the churches Hawksmoor designed, St Mary Woolnoth, is based on the Temple’s supposedly cubic shape. Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s pyramid is divided into five segments, which is reputedly another piece of Masonic symbolism.

Number Three: William MacKenzie’s Pyramid Mausoleum in St Andrew’s Churchyard, Liverpool

William Mackenzie’s pyramid tomb, in St Andrew’s Churchyard, Liverpool. (Photo: Rodhullandemu)

Another pyramid linked to ‘sinister’ mysteries can be found in St Andrew’s Presbyterian Churchyard, in Rodney Street, Liverpool. The pyramid is the tomb of William MacKenzie (1794-1851), a civil engineer and contractor who worked on some of Europe’s most important railways and canals. According to legend, MacKenzie was a gambler who had a wager with the Devil. To stop Satan claiming his soul, MacKenzie was interred sitting upright in his pyramid holding a winning hand of cards – as the Devil could never beat him, McKenzie hoped his soul would be safe.

The churchyard in Rodney Street is said to be haunted by MacKenzie’s ghost, a shadowy phantom in a top hat and cape that walks through the locked gates of the graveyard before entering the pyramid. A man who ‘saw’ the ghost in 1871 – and shortly afterwards died of fright – described MacKenzie’s face as being lit up with fire and his eyes as black and lifeless.

A slight variation on his legend says that one night MacKenzie played poker with a Mr Madison, who turned out to be the Devil. MacKenzie sold his soul in exchange for a winning streak and went on to request interment above ground in a bid to evade the Evil One’s clutches.

These stories, however, have little basis in fact. The pyramid tomb was commissioned by MacKenzie’s brother 17 years after his death. The inscription on the monument states ‘in the vault beneath lie the remains of William MacKenzie’, suggesting the pyramid’s occupant was interred neither above ground nor sitting up.

Another local legend has MacKenzie – in addition to his exploits on the railways and canals – operating as a body snatcher. He would – apparently – dig up fresh Liverpool corpses, pickle them in barrels and send them by ship to Scottish medical schools. There’s no evidence, however, to suggest that William MacKenzie led anything other than an upright and sober life, driven on by a ferocious Protestant work ethic.

Number Four: The Pyramid Tomb of Dr Francis Douce in Nether Wallop, Hampshire

Dr Francis Douce’s pyramid tomb at Nether Wallop, Hampshire, England. (Photo: Chris Talbot)

At Nether Wallop in Hampshire, a 15-foot (4.6-metre) pyramid can be seen in St Andrew’s Churchyard. Built for the physician Dr Francis Douce (1675-1760) in 1748, the pyramid boasts a flaming torch – a symbol of immortality – on its pinnacle. On the structure’s side are a coat-of-arms and an inscription proclaiming Douce ‘a Doctor of Physick’. In smooth sombre dark stone, this grade-II-listed tomb stands somewhat ominously in front of the church’s tower.

For the Ancient Egyptians, it was vital that the body was mummified and preserved and Douce seems to have had similar concerns. A member of the Company of Surgeons, he was obsessed with embalming, subscribing to a book in 1705 entitled The Art of Embalming Wherein Is Shown the Right of Burials and Funeral Ceremonies, especially that of Preserving Bodies after the Egyptian Method. This book laments the decay of unembalmed corpses – and stresses how easily they can be desecrated by animals and body snatchers – as well as recommending the pyramid as ‘the most durable structure’.

Douce’s will goes into exhaustive detail about how his pyramid should be maintained, and he left money to the parish – to support the elderly and educate poor children – on the condition his pyramid was well looked after. John Blake, the architect of Douce’s pyramid mausoleum, stated of the structure: ‘the area of the vault … is curiously paved with stone: the walls being very substantial … so it is a receptacle or lodging room fit for the remains of a prince … and the doctor’s bones may sleep undisturbed “till the Last Day”.’

Number Five: The Loudon Pyramid, St John the Baptist’s Churchyard, Pinner, Middlesex

The Loudon Pyramid in Pinner, Middlesex, England. (Photo: EdwardX)

If you were wandering through St John the Baptist’s Churchyard in Pinner, you might be startled by the sight of a pyramid with a stone coffin thrust through its centre. Legend claims the architectural writer John Claudius Loudon designed this tomb as an ingenious response to a problem plaguing his family.

John was in danger of forfeiting his inheritance as a strange legal clause only permitted the Loudons to keep their fortune for as long as John’s parents ‘remained above ground’. By having the pyramid support his parents’ coffin, John made sure they did indeed stay ‘above ground’ and so their fortune could be passed down to him.

Number Six: Pyramid in St Thomas’s Churchyard, Box, Wiltshire

A small pyramid on a grave in Box, Wiltshire, England. (Photo: Brian Robert Marshall)

A small pyramid-like structure stands on a grave in St Thomas’s Churchyard, in the village of Box, Wiltshire. The tomb bears no legible inscription and no records have been found that can account for its unusual shape. A local legend, however, maintains that the widow of the tomb’s occupant planned to dance on his grave to celebrate his passing. To prevent this indignity, his friends erected a small pyramid over his resting place.

Number Seven: ‘His and Hers’ Pyramids in Staverton, Gloucestershire

The ‘his and hers’ pyramid tombs of the St Clairs, Staverton, Gloucestershire, England. (Photo: Phillip Halling)

In Staverton Churchyard, identical ‘his and hers’ pyramids commemorate David St Clair and his wife Elizabeth. Built upon Elizabeth’s death in 1855, the monuments proclaim the St Clairs ‘an ancient family’. For centuries, the St Clairs had been associated with the Freemasons, so this connection may well have influenced the unusual design of David and Elizabeth’s tombs.

Number Eight: Pyramid to a Horse on Farley Mount, Hampshire

This attractive white pyramid on Farley Mount commemorates a horse. (Photo: Alfabetponcho)

Not all English pyramids commemorate humans. On Farley Mount, Hampshire, an impressive white pyramid honours a horse that – a plaque tells us – in ‘September 1733 leaped into a chalk pit twenty-five feet deep a fox-hunting with his master on his back.’ Both horse and master survived and the horse went on to win ‘the hunter’s plate on Worthy Downs and was rode by his owner.’

That owner, Sir Paulet St John, was so grateful to his horse for both saving his life and winning him – no doubt – a substantial amount of money that he erected the pyramid. The Egyptians sometimes mummified animals, and creatures as diverse as cats and fish have been found in their tombs. Could the Farley Mount pyramid be a similar attempt to conserve the memory of a beloved non-human companion?

In Leckhampton, Gloucestershire, a more basic memorial – a rough pyramid of large stones – marks the grave of The Continental, a favourite horse that died in 1902.

Number Nine: Memorial to ‘The World’s Oldest Man’, in Bolton-on-Swale, Yorkshire

A pyramid-shaped memorial to Henry Jenkins, in Bolton-on-Swale. (Photo: Tom Courtney)

In the churchyard of Bolton-on-Swale, Yorkshire, there stands a pyramid-shaped memorial to Henry Jenkins, a local man said to have lived to the age of 169. Even after he reached 100, Henry apparently fathered a child and swam regularly across the Swale, England’s fastest-flowing river. 

Supposedly born in 1501, Henry claimed to have helped transport arrows to the Battle of Flodden Field (1513) and to have met the Abbot of Fountains Abbey (closed by Henry VIII in 1539) while working as a butler. Henry Jenkins died in 1670 and his pyramid memorial was erected in 1743. In Ancient Egypt, after 30 years on the throne – and every three or four years thereafter – the Pharaoh would take part in the Heb Sed festival, during which he would run around a ritual course four times to prove his continued vitality and fitness to rule. A pyramid is perhaps, therefore, a suitable monument to Henry Jenkins’s long life and incredible vigour. 

Number Ten: The Earl of Buckingham’s Pyramid Mausoleum, Blickling Hall, Norfolk

The Earl of Buckingham’s pyramid, Blickling Hall, Norfolk, England. (Photo: Northmetpit)

If you wander through the very English gardens of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, you’ll come across a pyramid tomb. An incredible 45 feet (13.7 metres) high, the pyramid contains the bodies of the Second Earl of Buckingham (died 1793) and his two wives. The Earl’s arms are prominently displayed, over an enormous portico. Inside, the pyramid mausoleum boasts a marble pavement and three stone sarcophagi, which were brought by water from London.

The pyramid was commissioned by the Earl’s daughter Caroline – who inherited his estates – and her husband. This display of mortuary grandeur set the couple back by the equivalent of £200,000 in today’s money, a cost met in part by Caroline selling her jewellery. The pyramids of Ancient Egypt were intended as impressively-sized legacies to the pharaohs’ importance that would endure down the ages. Perhaps Caroline’s outlay of cash was made in the hope of similar results for the Earl.

Honourable Mentions

A number of impressive pyramid tombs are scattered around England and – though there isn’t space to describe them all here – I want to mention a few pointy-topped memorials that didn’t quite make the top ten.

In Sharow, Yorkshire, can be found the pyramid of Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900). A professor of astronomy, Smyth became obsessed with Ancient Egypt. Convinced the Great Pyramid held the secrets of the universe, he travelled to Egypt, where he studied its every stone and calculated its every angle. He took the first photos of its interior, using coils of magnesium wire to produce a bright light. Out of all this came several books, most notably Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. Smyth’s ideas provoked both praise and ridicule though towards the end of his life the mockery outweighed the plaudits. Perhaps as a compensation, Smyth is buried under his own pyramid, with its inscription declaring him ‘a Bright Star in the Firmament of Ardent Explorers of the Works of their Creator.’

The pyramid tomb of Charles Piazzi Smyth in Sharow, Yorkshire, England. (Photo: Kevin Waterhouse)

Near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, a dilapidated pyramid lies on the edge of a wood. It marks the place where in 1827 Anna Maria Reade glimpsed the ghost of her son John, who was away working in India. Anna Maria was so convinced her son was dead that she organised a memorial service for him at Ipsden Church. News of John’s passing came the day after the service had taken place.

Pyramid-shaped memorial to John Thurlow Reade, near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, England. (Photo: Giles Robinson)

In the churchyard of Attleborough, Norfolk, is the pyramid of one William Henry Brocke, who died in 1929. Brocke, a solicitor, left a will which – with lawyer-like precision – gave exact instructions for how his tomb should be constructed. The pyramid is six feet (1.82 metres) high and built of white limestone. The Ancient Egyptian pyramids were originally clad in white limestone too, so they would shimmer in homage to the sun.

Lawyer Brocke’s pyramid tomb in Attleborough, Norfolk. (Photo: Adrian S Pye)

Pyramid tombs seem especially common in the churchyards of Gloucestershire. A three-sided pyramid – in honour of the Holy Trinity – serves as a memorial to the Dunn Family at Woodchester. Handsome pyramids also mark the graves of textile titan Joseph Ellis at Stonehouse, the Dyer family at Prestbury, and the famous stonemason (possibly also a Freemason) John Bryan at Painswick.

The Dunn’s pyramid, in Woodchester, Gloucestershire, is three-sided, in homage to the Holy Trinity. (Photo: OrangeStarling1997)

What Might Have Inspired the Georgians and Victorians to Build England’s Pyramid Tombs?

The English pyramid tombs described above were largely the result of Egyptomania. This craze intensified as the 18^th and 19^th centuries progressed, with explorers and colonialists bringing back more accounts of Egypt and scholars and archaeologists uncovering more of its ancient secrets.

Ancient Egypt especially chimed with the growing Victorian obsession with death. We can see this in the Egyptian Avenue in the grand Victorian necropolis of Highgate Cemetery and in the high society parties during which ‘Ancient Egyptian mummies’ – some genuine, some fake – would be ‘unwrapped’ before a fascinated audience. In one particularly bizarre case, the body of a respectable Manchester heiress even ended up being mummified and displayed in a local museum alongside mummies from Peru and Egypt. It’s not surprising that Egyptomania inspired a number of English people to have pyramids – albeit miniature ones – constructed for their own tombs.

The gate of the Egyptian Avenue in Highgate Cemetery, London. (Photo: John Armagh)

But perhaps the pyramid – though more popular in some eras than others – is an archetype that prevails through the ages, an archetype that represents common human hopes, desires and fears. It seems to me that the whole concept of the pyramid – and the mummification rituals linked to it – is centred on the idea of having things preserved.

This could be people wishing – whether Egyptian Pharaohs or English aristocrats – to have their grandeur embodied by a striking stone monument that will last through the centuries. It could also be people wishing to conserve their wealth, whether we’re talking about an inheritance in Pinner or the treasures discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, which included ‘strange animals, statues and gold – everywhere the glint of gold.’

There is also, of course, the obsession with resurrection and the fate of the soul in the afterlife. There’s speculation that early stepped pyramids were seen as staircases that allowed the Pharaoh’s soul to ascend to heaven. In addition, pyramids may have been viewed as devices designed to ‘shoot’ the Pharaoh’s spirit into the dark section of the night sky. This area – around which the stars appear to revolve – might have been seen as the gateway to the realm of the gods. The legends attached to England’s pyramid tombs also show a desire for resurrection and concerns over the safeguarding of the soul.

The pyramid of John Bryan in Painswick, Gloucestershire. (Photo: Wilson44691)

The 18^th and 19^th centuries were times of growing individualism and this was apparent in the culture of death. The idea that an individual could ever cease to exist was becoming difficult to deal with. This led to a greater focus on the fate of the corpse. As with Doctor Douce, there was a fixation on the embalming and coffining of bodies, as well as a growth in the number of individualistic tombs. It’s easy to see why the mummified bodies, pyramids and stone sarcophagi of the Egyptians resonated so significantly with the Georgians and Victorians.

All this has left some very special monuments in our churchyards though whether these English pyramid tombs will ever enjoy the longevity or fame of the pharaohs’ mausoleums remains to be seen. 

(This article’s main image – showing Mad Jack Fuller’s pyramid mausoleum – is courtesy of tristan forward.)

The post England’s Top 10 Pyramid Tombs – the Strangest Mausoleums appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

An obsession with mummies and all things Egyptian had been raging through Britain for some time, but this particular exhibit hadn’t been plundered from a pyramid or snatched from a colony. The mummy was the body of one Hannah Beswick, a wealthy Manchester woman who’d died seventy years earlier.

Hannah’s remains – displayed in a glass case between mummies from Egypt and Peru – proved popular with the paying public. In fact, she was the museum’s star exhibit. But how did a lady from a respectable Manchester family end up as the attraction that became known as the Manchester Mummy?

The following tale includes duplicitous doctors, fears of being buried alive, ‘corpses’ rising up out of coffins, glimpses of Hannah’s ghost, macabre collections of ‘curiosities’, rumours of hidden treasure, and a society negotiating shifting perceptions of life, death, science, entertainment and medicine.

Let’s see if we can unwrap the peculiar case of the Manchester Mummy.

The Origins of the Manchester Mummy: A Resurrected Relative and a Fear of Being Buried Alive

In 1688, Hannah was born to John and Patience Beswick of Cheetwood Old Hall, Manchester. She inherited substantial wealth when her father died in 1706. Hannah moved to a manor house called Birchin Bower, in Hollinwood, near Oldham, where she led an unremarkable and comfortable life. This agreeable existence, however, was disturbed by the ‘death’ of her brother John.

Just before the funeral, as the mourners were about to close the coffin, somebody saw John’s eyelids flicker. The family physician Dr Charles White stepped up, examined the body and declared to John’s astounded friends and relatives that he wasn’t actually dead. The funeral was abandoned, John recovered consciousness a few days later and lived for many more years.

A terror of being buried alive was widespread in Georgian and Victorian times.

This incident must have been shocking for Hannah and all those present, but such cases weren’t as unusual as we might think. The medical understanding of phenomena such as comas and resuscitation techniques was primitive compared to today. There were well-publicised cases of people waking up in mortuaries, at their funerals or on the dissection or embalming table. Evidence also sometimes emerged of those who hadn’t been so lucky and who’d suffered a dreadful death after being entombed or buried alive.

It seems Hannah developed a deep fear of such a fate befalling her. As well as the dramatic incident with John, it’s likely she was affected by the widespread terror of premature interment that haunted the Georgian (1714-1837) and Victorian (1837-1901) epochs. Horrific stories circulated, and lurid books and newspaper articles were published, giving details of those who’d been found – their fingers bloodied, their shrouds torn – who’d died while trying to escape their coffins and tombs.

When Hannah wrote her will – dated 25^th July 1757, less than a year before she died – she was still under the shadow of such fears. She demanded her body be kept above ground and regularly examined for signs of life until it was certain she was dead.

A Disputed Will, a Possibly Dishonest Doctor and the Making of the Manchester Mummy

Dr Charles White, the creator of the Manchester Mummy

There seems to be some confusion over the terms of Hannah Beswick’s will. It’s rumoured she left £25,000 (equivalent to about three million pounds today) to Dr Charles White provided he delay her burial until he was sure she was dead. But her will actually states that White should get only £100 and that £400 should be spent on funeral expenses. It’s been suggested that Hannah might have permitted White to keep any of the £400 left over. Some think he may also have been in debt to Beswick and would therefore have been expected to repay what he owed following the funeral. So it could have been in White’s interest to find a way to make sure no funeral took place. Hannah’s will, however, lists Mary Graeme and Esther Robinson as executors rather than White. Hannah Beswick’s will was still being disputed over a century after her death.

What we do know is that White embalmed Hannah’s body. This was despite the fact her will didn’t request embalming and stated that burial should only be postponed until there was no doubt she was dead. As well as the financial motives mentioned above, White may not have been able to resist possessing a mummified human. Like many scientifically inclined gentlemen of his period, White had a ‘collection of curiosities’ – a sinister hoard that boasted both ‘wet and dry’ specimens, among them the skeleton of Thomas Higgins, an infamous highwayman who’d been hanged. White – a founder of the Manchester Royal Infirmary and a pioneer of obstetrics – seems to have been obsessed with anatomy.

The exact method White used to create the Manchester Mummy isn’t known. White, however, had been a student of the anatomist Dr William Hunter, who’d developed the technique of ‘arterial embalming’. This involved filling the body’s veins and arteries with a mixture of turpentine, vermilion and oil of lavender and rosemary. Also, under this method, the organs were removed and shrunk in water, blood and fluids were squeezed from the corpse, and the body was washed with alcohol. The organs were then put back and the body’s cavities filled with plaster of paris. Finally, the body was sewn up, the openings were stuffed with camphor and the corpse was coated with tar. It’s likely White used such a procedure to transform Hannah Beswick into the Manchester Mummy.

The Manchester Mummy Is Displayed and Hannah Acquires a Fame She Never Found in Life

Hannah’s mummy was first kept at Ancoats Hall, the house of a member of her family. Soon, however, she was moved to White’s home in nearby Sale, where she was kept in the case of a grandfather clock. News of the Manchester Mummy soon spread and visitors streamed to White’s house to view her. White entertained them by whipping back a curtain that covered where the clock’s face would have been – to reveal the embalmed face of Hannah. Celebrities, like the author Thomas de Quincy, were among those who flocked to see Hannah’s corpse. It’s not known if any of them commented on how the remains of a rich heiress propped up in a clock made a fitting piece of memento mori art.

When White died in 1813, he left the Manchester Mummy to a friend and colleague, one Dr Ollier. Upon Ollier’s death in 1828, the mummy was given to the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society. It soon became one of the museum’s most popular items and began to be widely referred to as the Manchester Mummy or the Mummy of Birchin Bower. Hannah was exhibited in the entrance hall between considerably more ancient mummies from Egypt and Peru. Her relatives were allowed to visit her for free.

The Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society, where the Manchester Mummy was displayed.

No photos or sketches of the Manchester Mummy have survived, but the local historian Phillip Wentworth described Hannah thus: ‘The body was well-preserved, but the face was shrivelled and black. The legs and trunk were tightly bound in a strong cloth … and the body, which was that of a little old woman, was in a glass coffin-shaped case.’

A visitor in 1844 observed that Hannah was ‘one of the most remarkable exhibits in the museum’. According to the writer Edith Sitwell, the ‘cold dark shadow of her mummy hung over Manchester.’

In 1867, the museum – which was experiencing financial difficulties – was bought by Owens College, a forerunner of the University of Manchester. Around the time of this sale, it was decided that Hannah was ‘irrevocably and unmistakably dead’. With all doubts concerning her mortality resolved, it was felt the terms of her will should be respected and she should be given burial. It’s also worth pointing out that the public’s fascination with the Manchester Mummy was finally starting to wane.

The Manchester Mummy Is Laid to Rest

Burying the Manchester Mummy wouldn’t be a simple matter. Since 1837, UK law has stated that burials cannot take place unless a doctor has issued a death certificate. As Hannah had been dead for over a century, no such certificate could be drawn up. An appeal had to be submitted to the Secretary of State, who then ordered her burial.

With permission also granted from the Bishop of Manchester, Hannah Beswick could finally be laid to rest. On 22^nd July 1868, Hannah was buried in Harpurhey Cemetery, over 110 years after she had died. The Manchester Mummy was interred in an unmarked plot as there were fears such a famous corpse might be a target for graverobbers.

Rumours of Hidden Treasure and Reports of Hannah Beswick’s Ghost

In 1745, the Scottish rebel Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived in Manchester with his army. It’s said this caused Beswick concern over her money, prompting her to bury some of her fortune. Hannah, however, died without telling her relatives where she’d hidden the loot.

After Hannah’s death, Birchin Bower was converted into workers’ tenements. Some residents reported seeing a phantom figure in a black gown and white cap and the belief grew up this was the ghost of Hannah Beswick. This spectre would, apparently, float across a parlour then disappear when it reached a certain flagstone. Some claim a man living there levered that flagstone up, found a stash of gold and sold it to the Manchester dealer Oliphant’s, getting £3 10s (equivalent to around £450 in 2020) for each gold piece.

Hannah Beswick’s former home of Birchin Bower was reputedly haunted by her ghost.

The tenements were later knocked down and a factory for the electrical company Ferranti was built on the site. Glimpses of the black-gowned spook, however, continued. Perhaps the ghost is Hannah’s, angry at the way her remains have been treated.

A bizarre coda to the Manchester Mummy case came in 1890 when Cheetwood Old Hall was being demolished. A double coffin was unearthed beneath the drawing room. The mystery of this coffin has never been explained, but many suspected this grim discovery was linked to the Beswicks and Dr Charles White. The good doctor had lived for a time at the Hall after Hannah had moved out to Oldham.

What Does the Peculiar Case of the Manchester Mummy Tell Us?

The story of the Manchester Mummy is certainly a strange saga, but what does it tell us about the dark anxieties and obsessions from which such an artefact emerged? What does this sinister tale reveal about the epoch in which the Manchester Mummy was created, displayed and eventually laid to rest? Read on to learn of Georgian and Victorian terrors of being entombed alive and how Victorian respectability finally did battle with the freakish and macabre.

Hannah Beswick’s Phobia Was Just One Instance of a Widespread Fear of Being Buried Alive

Though people have always feared premature burial, the terror of such a fate became far more common in Georgian and Victorian times. This was largely due to advances in medical knowledge. By the 1740s, evidence was accumulating that people who seemed dead could sometimes be revived by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Doctors also started experimenting, occasionally successfully, with reviving patients using electrostatic machines. In 1774, a London doctor used a portable electrostatic generator to resurrect a ‘dead’ child who’d fallen from a window.

Medics were also realising that the symptoms indicating death could be deceptive. The new disease of cholera sometimes made it hard to feel a pulse and some doctors even suggested the symptoms of scurvy could be mistaken for putrefaction. As the public became aware that the boundaries between life and death were fuzzier than they had imagined, it caused great concern. If you could appear dead but were in fact revivable, surely this meant there was a significant danger of being buried alive.

Books and articles gave horrifying accounts of those who’d been buried too early. In 1885, the New York Times reported that a North Carolina man had been found turned over in his coffin with much of his hair pulled out and scratch marks on the casket’s insides. In 1886, when the coffin of a Canadian girl was opened, she was found with her knees tucked up under her body and her shroud ripped to pieces. In 1883, a Boston doctor published a book entitled One Thousand Persons Buried Alive by their Best Friends.

The terrors of premature interment resulted in some ingenious designs for coffins and tombs. Robert Robinson, from Manchester, who died in 1791, insisted his coffin should be fitted with a glass plate and his mausoleum with a door. A cemetery watchman was to check the glass to see if Robinson’s breath had misted it. Timothy Clarke Smith, who died in Vermont in 1893, stipulated his tomb should contain a window positioned six feet above his face so his friends could periodically check on him. Designs for ‘safety coffins’ were patented, equipped with air pipes or elaborate systems of flags and bells to attract attention. One casket even came fitted with a ladder to allow those mistakenly presumed departed to ‘ascend from the grave’.

A common fear of being buried alive led to a range of ‘safety coffins’ being patented.

Others, like Hannah Beswick, insisted in their wills that burial should be delayed until there was no doubt they were deceased. Creative ways of ascertaining a person’s demise ranged from making surgical incisions and touching the corpse with red-hot irons to applying scalding liquids and even blowing smoke into the rectum!

There were perhaps good reasons why Hannah’s dread of premature burial was shared by many in her epoch. In 1895, the physician J.C. Ouseley estimated that 2,700 people might be buried prematurely in England and Wales each year. In 1896, one of the founders of the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial stated he’d uncovered 219 incidences of narrowly escaped premature burial, 149 cases of actual premature burial, 10 cases of bodies being dissected before death and two instances of embalming being attempted on people still alive.

Such estimates may have been exaggerations. According to the folklorist Paul Barber, the normal effects of decomposition can make it seem like corpses have been twisting around in their coffins. But the problem at the time was that while medicine was advanced enough to recognise that the signs of death could be misleading, it was still too basic to have found reliable ways of dealing with this issue. Though some physicians advocated electric shocks and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as means of revival, such techniques would not achieve full medical respectability until the mid-1900s.

Hannah Beswick’s fears were an early example of the terrors that gripped the Georgian and Victorian worlds. Such anxieties can be seen in the literature of the era. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories The Premature Burial, The Cask of Amontillado and The Fall of the House of Usher all deal with the horror of being interred too soon. Frankenstein, published in 1818, examines the murky frontiers that divide the dead from the living while darkly exploring the possibilities of reanimation. A fascination with the ambiguous spaces between life and death can also be discerned in the growing popularity of the vampire genre.

Respectable Victorian Society Begins to Separate the Educational, the Medical, the Entertaining and the Freakish

Hannah Beswick’s transformation into the Manchester Mummy came in an age in which the boundaries between science and curiosity, education and amusement were much looser than today. Collectors hoarded items that could advance scientific and medical knowledge alongside objects that were merely status symbols or sources of entertainment for their friends. Some artefacts – such as the Manchester Mummy – could fulfil all these purposes.

Dr White probably enhanced his anatomical expertise thanks to his mummification of Hannah, but he also enjoyed the showmanship of tugging his curtain back to reveal Hannah’s face to his astonished guests. He no doubt also appreciated the celebrity the Manchester Mummy gave him. White’s mentor Dr Hunter possessed an eclectic collection of around 10,000 artefacts, ranging from books, coins and shells to geological and medical specimens to items that were utterly macabre. Hunter’s collection, for instance, included the skeleton of the famous ‘Irish Giant’, the seven-foot seven-inch tall Charles Byrne.

Such an approach was also common in the museums of the period. With their disorganised and frequently bizarre collections, museums were viewed not just as places of education, but as centres for satisfying one’s curiosity and even morbid voyeurism. And the epoch did have a fascination with human remains. As well as Hannah’s corpse, the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society boasted a bitumen-covered Peruvian mummy, a preserved Maori head and an Egyptian mummy called Asroni, who still resides in Manchester Museum today. Indeed, a popular pastime in the era was watching the unwrapping and dissection of Egyptian mummies (some genuine, some fake). These events, despite having an educational veneer, were primarily spectacles. Some unwrappings were organised as high society parties, with fancy invitations sent to guests; others were ticketed public events, which often sold out.

In such a ghoulishly curious epoch, in which enthusiasm for new knowledge and science mingled with the desire to be entertained, it’s not a surprise that the Manchester Mummy was a popular attraction.

A Victorian mummy unwrapping session

This attitude, however, began to change as the Victorian age progressed. At the same time as scientific knowledge was expanding, an educational and moral earnestness started to grip Britain. Museums were becoming more professional and their displays better organised into distinct categories. Macabre exhibits like the Manchester Mummy – which had little obvious educational value and didn’t fit into any scientific classification – began to fall foul of both moral and academic outlooks. 

These strengthening ideals of educational virtue and civic culture can be seen in the fact that – a few years after the Manchester Mummy’s burial – Owens College moved from its city-centre, crime-plagued location on the insalubrious Quay Street. Here, according to one critic, ‘the entrance from Deansgate was guarded by a very Scylla and Charybdis of disreputable public houses’. The college fled to Oxford Road on what were then the more wholesome outskirts of the city. A grand Victorian Gothic building – designed by Alfred Waterhouse, also responsible for London’s Natural History Museum and Manchester’s splendid town hall – was built to house both the college and the revamped Manchester Museum. (As the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society was now known.)

All this could be seen as a seizing of control of culture, leisure and learning by a rising, confident and respectable middle class. The Manchester Mummy – with its ghoulish aura of the freakshow – didn’t fit into this new world and so Hannah was decently buried.

Manchester Museum is housed in a Victorian Gothic building designed by the famous architect Alfred Waterhouse (Image courtesy of David Dixon)

In both life and death, Hannah Beswick made a strange, centuries-spanning journey. This journey took her from being an individual person to a source of wealth and bequests to a scientific experiment to a macabre curiosity to an embarrassing inconvenience to a person deserving of basic respect once more. Thus, to the sound of the shovelled earth of Harpurhey Cemetery, the Manchester Mummy’s bizarre odyssey came to its end.

But perhaps mythological and ancient archetypes – such as mummies – will always have the ability to break free from the past and intrude into more modern cultures, especially cultures undergoing intense anxiety or change. Similar folkloric characters that have invaded later eras include Glasgow’s Gorbals Vampire, the Cardiff Giant, the Highgate Vampire and London’s Spring-Heeled Jack. Both modern innovations and modern fears can encourage such interlopers. With the Manchester Mummy, we can see how the archaic and up-to-date, the gruesome and clinical, the superstitious and scientific were all wrapped up in one sinister figure.

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